Fedora Core 6 Test 2 Release

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.
• Ability to install from additional yum repositories during anaconda installations and kickstarts.
• Functional Java applet plugin for Firefox due to gcjwebplugin. - Many Java applets should work out of the box.
• A new default font, DejaVu, replaces Vera.
• KDE 3.5.3 Desktop
• Latest release of Eclipse IDE and framework.
• Xen 3.0 Virtualization

While there does not seem to be a many significant changes, I am eager to see the changes in the installer (Anaconda) as well as the Java changes and system wide improvements. The rather slow state of FC5 has left me very dissatisfied.

More information regarding the official release time frame can be found on the Fedora Core schedule.

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