Mauriat Miranda     mjmwired

Fedora Core 5 Test 2 Released

The second beta for Fedora Core 5 is available for download and testing. The bittorrent page is updated as well as the main Fedora download page.

I do not think the main Release Notes have been updated yet, but some of the release highlights include:

  • A completely revamped look and feel including a bubbly new theme, wallpaper, screensaver and logo has been provided that is visually appealing and demonstrates the exciting and user friendly nature of Fedora.
  • GNOME 2.13.2 and KDE 3.5 Release Candidate 2 desktop environments are available.
  • GNOME Power Manager and GNOME Screensaver are available as a technology preview within this release.
  • OpenOffice.org 2.0 final release is included. OpenOffice.org now uses system versions for many of the libraries leading to increased performance and efficiency.
  • Xorg X11R7 Release Candidate 3 has been included in this release. This is the first modular version, which helps in providing additional features and bug fixes at a faster pace.
  • Mono, an open source development environment for .NET, is available in this release. Also included are Mono-based applications such as the Beagle desktop search tool and F-Spot, a photo management tool.
  • Kernel 2.6.14 is included. Software suspend is enabled in this release.
  • Pup, a graphical updater using yum, is available in this release.
  • Fedora now sports a brand new logo and changes in the animated mouse cursor theme.
  • gcc 4.1 compiler is included and the entire set of Fedora packages is now build using this new compiler version which brings in new security and performance enhancements.
  • The PCMCIA framework used by laptops and mobile devices has changed with kernel version 2.6.13-rc1 onwards. The older pcmcia-cs package using the cardmgr/pcmcia service has been relaced with a new pcmciautils package where the PCMCIA devices are handled directly with the hotplug system using udev dynamically in this Fedora release. This increases both efficiency and performance of the system.

As always test releases should not be used for desktop or production machines. These typically contain many bugs and may not be well tested for a variety of conditions.

I hope to review this distribution over the next week to see the changes done by the Fedora Community.

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

1 Comments:

  • Mauriat on January 17, 2006 - 07:07 AM

    First attempt to install FC5-test2 crashed the installer (Anaconda). Will try again later…