Fedora 8 renews tradition of innovations
By Bruce Byfield
October 23, 2007 (9:00:00 AM)
Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny.
By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions.
After seven releases of its own and the previous Red Hat releases, Fedora has most aspects of putting a distribution together down to a routine. Like the previous release, Fedora 8 is available as a net install or from two live CDs, one of which features GNOME and the other KDE. Little has changed in its Anaconda installer from recent releases, wallpaper aside.
Nor are the trio of yum, Pirut, and Pup for software installation greatly changed, aside from a noticeable increase in speed. The security tools centering around SELinux are similarly unchanged, and you can take as a given that Fedora 8 has the latest versions of all the standard productivity tools, such as GNOME 2.20, OpenOffice.org 2.3, and Firefox 2.0.0.6, as well as a 2.6.23 tickless kernel, which theoretically results in power savings and a cooler CPU.
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