The second beta for Fedora Core 6 (FC6-Test2) is available for testers and users alike. While FC6-Test1 was made available last June, there was not a significant set of improvements over the FC5 release. The notable issues in FC6-Test2 are: All packages recompiled (minus Thunderbird) Introduction of DT_GU_HASH, a far more efficient symbol lookup table for dynamic linking. ** Improves dynamic linking performance by up to 50%** Packages built with new build system based on Mock.

I do not know how many people require PHP4 on Fedora Core 5. However since I find that I use it, I am providing PHP4 binary RPMs. Since I made the files available I did receive some complaints. Primarily a compile failure on x86_64 architecture and a compile failure on PPC architecture. I have no means to test PPC, however I have tested with x86_64 and had success. For x86_64 architecture, I have tested the src.

After almost 14 months, the MPlayer developers put out a new release: 1.0pre8 (I doubt 1.0 will ever happen). The official announcement was made on the mailing list on Monday. The mailing list had implied a release was pending. In the meantime, Fedora Core 4 came and went and Fedora fans are on FC5. The good news is that MPlayer properly supports GCC4.x (which FC4 and FC5 use). Anyone who has used a development build already knows these improvements.

Over the last weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 on a Dell Latitude D810 laptop. Unlike Jason’s laptop criteria, I basically required a Dell laptop. I wanted the D610, however it was unavailable and I had to settle for the D810. Even though I customized it, I really did not have any control over what hardware specifically would be better for Linux. However one luxury I was afforded was to be able to maximize the provided features.

With the recent purchase of a new harddrive I did not want to re-install every operating system on my previous drive. Since I dual boot with Windows, I first attempted to copy Windows. I tried multiple solutions and Norton Ghost met my requirements however a problem in 48bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) in Windows 2000 caused too many problems. In the end I re-installed Windows. (Note: Linux does not have this problem).