Due to an upgrade in GCC, the next test release of Fedora Core 5 will be pushed back a few weeks. Personally, I planned on using the holidays to test it, but I do not think that will be an option. From the fedora-devel mailing list: Ok, it won’t be a full month, but due to the recent upgrade of gcc and the subsequent full rebuild of everything that does (and doesn’t, whoops!

The Fedora Team has released the first test release of the upcoming Fedora Core 5 (FC5). Notable Features of FC5 Test1 Modular X.org Vastly improved Asian language input support with SCIM Kernel based on 2.6.15-rc1-git3 GCC 4.0.2 GNOME 2.12 KDE 3.4.92 Xen 3.0 snapshot for i386 Improved Open Source Java including gcj, classpath, tomcat, jonas, eclipse, and much more 1600+ Extras packages conveniently available via yum Major installer changes to use yum for package handling Pup!

For Linux and Open Source in general, choice has always been abundant. However in both the Linux Server market and to a degree in the Linux “Desktop” market only a few major distributions have taken most attention. In my (future) spare time, I plan on evaluating new Linux distributions to see how well they compare for either a Linux Server (preliminary examination) and more critically: the Linux Desktop. I want to develop a common test/evaluation plan for different distributions so I make fair assessments on their comparable value.

Since Redhat stopped supporting their commercially available Linux distribution, they moved to an Enterprise Linux Server (RHEL) and left everyone else to use a community effort (Fedora Core). Considering the cost of RHEL, the source packages were recompiled and redistributed. The resulting CentOS is a free binary compatible distribution of RHEL without the proprietary Redhat only software. I have seen some virtual private servers using CentOS for the virtualized operating system.