… for me. I am finally giving up on Fedora as a server. I find it just too unreliable. I have been using Fedora since FC1 (and been on Redhat since RH6.0), but for the most part I only used it as a desktop operating system. When I was using FC3, I found it very helpful to mirror my website(s) on my local machine. This worked great, however with each new Fedora release I found more things breaking with my scripts and setup.

I noted some sites started pushing to PHP5 with the announcement last year that PHP4 would be EOL (end-of-life) in 2007. In truth I understand that there is no longer a compelling reason to remain with PHP4. The biggest obstacle was older software that did not support PHP5 (since version 5 is incompatible with version 4 in some respects). However there is no reason why most of that software cannot be updated, and if so I am pretty sure that some alternate version 5 compatible software exists.

Do you fear the “Werewolf” ***** ? The Fedora project just released Fedora 8 with a great deal of enthusiasm. Fedora had been slipping behind in the past few releases and there have always been quality issues, but the team hopes this release will put them back on track. The highlights from the Release Summary: Graphics/Multimedia PulseAudio - A revamped sound system addressing many of the limitations and problems with older Linux sound systems.

The MPlayer team released RC2 of the multimedia package. The last release RC1 was almost 12 months ago. The changes are typical: newer support of less significant codecs, major optimizations and improvements on more popular codecs. This release has a great deal of work done on streaming (Live555). I don’t know if we will ever see an official 1.0 release, however it seems unimportant as everyone probably should just be updating their “snapshots” of MPlayer ever 3-4 months so they don’t have to wait 14 or 12 months.

Hans de Goede announced on the Fedora-devel the creation of RPM Fusion. RPM Fusion aims to bring together many packagers from various 3rd party repos and build a single add-on repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We don’t have a repository ready for end users yet, but we are actively working on merging the following ones: http://dribble.org.uk/ http://freshrpms.net/ http://rpm.livna.org/ We will have two distinct repositories: free and non-free.