Fedora 21 talking points

DISCUSSION DRAFT
This is a draft only for discussion. This is not a final set of talking points, nor are all of the features listed here complete at the time of this draft. Please do a reality check before using these talking points as anything other tnan a discussion draft!

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 21 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release, and to help drive content for the release, etc.

The talking points are based in part on the Change Set for this release.

Fedora Workstation

GNOME 3.14

The desktop environment for Fedora Workstation is GNOME 3.14, which includes a host of new features including captive portal handling, multitouch support, and network-based sharing. More details are available in the GNOME 3.14 release notes.

Application Installer Continued

The Software app not only provides an elegant way to install, remove, and update all your software in one place, but also includes updated information for more apps than ever. The Software app also offers add-ons for some popular apps so you can extend capabilities, and add fonts and input sources.

Terminal improvements

To assist users who map shortcut key combinations themselves, or when using command line apps with their own key combos, there is now a simple preferences toggle to disable Terminal shortcuts. In addition, automatic title updates help identify different Terminals when running multiple instances. The GNOME desktop overview also allows you to locate these Terminals by name. For users who seek a slightly different visual experience, you can now use transparent backgrounds in the Terminal as well.

DevAssistant

DevAssistant helps software developers get a development environment set up quickly. DevAssistant comes in both CLI and GUI flavors, and supports numerous language runtimes and IDEs. More details are available at the DevAssistant home page.

Wayland

It is possible to run the full GNOME experience on the new Wayland graphical server, by choosing the Wayland type session from the login screen. Wayland is meant to replace the older Xorg server. It solves numerous input device, display resolution, and application security issues that affect Xorg. Wayland is expected to be the default display server in a future Fedora, but in Fedora 21 it is optional, and users can opt into it.

Fedora Server

Anaconda Support for Server Roles

Deploying Server Roles during installation requires a higher level of access to the installed system than %post can provide. The Fedora Server offers an Anaconda plug-in that adds kickstart directives to deploy available server roles.

Cockpit Management Console

The Fedora Server offers the Cockpit Project (a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser) as available by default, providing an approachable tool for system management.

Easy to use

Cockpit is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.

No interference

Jumping between the terminal and the web tool is no problem. A service started via Cockpit can be stopped via the terminal. Likewise, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface.

Multi-server

You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time.

Domain Controller Server Role

The Fedora Server is shipped with a role-deployment mechanism. One such role is to act as a primary or replica Domain Controller for the Linux machines in the network.

This is implemented by taking advantage of the FreeIPA project, packaging it up within the Server Role Framework and enabling it to be deployed through the mechanisms described in the Server Role Infrastructure.

Framework for Server Role Deployment

The Fedora Server offers a new D-BUS service for exposing available server roles, making it possible to deploy, configure and manage them. Appropriate functionality will also be exposed as a command-line utility.

Headless Java

Server installations of Fedora should usually not pull in packages related to X system or sound subsystem. For this reason part of OpenJDK package has been split into headless subpackage which has smaller dependency chain. Fedora packages should be migrated to require java-headless instead of full java package when appropriate.

OpenJDK package in Fedora has been traditionally monolithic, pulling in a lot of dependencies including (but not limited to)

• libXrender
• libXi
• libXtst
• pulseaudio

This is obviously not optimal for minimal server installations where OpenJDK is used for web application development and deployment.

Designed after Debian packaging, Fedora OpenJDK package has been split into packages providing java and java-headless. This makes it possible for packages to use "Requires: java-headless". For most libraries and generic packages this is sufficient. End-user applications should keep "Requires: java" to pull in full OpenJDK package. BuildRequires on "java-devel" are unaffected.

Fedora Cloud

Atomic Cloud Image

Fedora 21 offers a streamlined image that is designed specifically for hosting Linux containers. Built with rpm-ostree, this image includes just the packages you need to have a top-notch container host, and nothing more. It includes Docker, Kubernetes, Cockpit, cloud-init, and features "atomic" updates (and rollbacks!) using the "atomic upgrade" command.

Lightweight and task-specific, the Atomic Host is what you want for deploying apps in containers rather than by installing and configuring apps using RPM/Yum.

(A)Periodic Updates to Cloud Images

We will be releasing cloud images with latest packages in a regular basis. Since cloud images are usually short-lived, this allows new instances to be created without the overhead of applying several months' updates. This will also help us in getting security updates streamlined in the Cloud image.

Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

Space is precious in the cloud, therefore the Cloud SIG tries to keep the images' footprint as small as reasonably possible. Therefore, we split the kernel into two (plus one meta) packages. One package would contain the core modules, i.e. a minimum(-ish) set of modules to only just be able to run in virtualized environments. And another package for the rest. The 'kernel' package would then become a meta package that installs both (-core and -modules).

Kubernetes Packages

New to Fedora 21, the Kubernetes orchestration project is packaged for use with Docker containers. Kubernetes is a container cluster manager that can schedule any number of container replicas across a group of node instances.

Fedora Dockerfiles

Fedora 21 includes a Fedora Dockerfiles package with a number of Dockerfiles to build ready-to-run containers with popular applications like MariaDB, Nginx, and more. Dockerfiles are like a recipe to build a container using the base Fedora Docker image plus additional packages and configuration.

Convert Fedora Cloud image to Fedora Server

We now have a command line tool to convert any running Fedora Cloud instance into a Fedora Server instance. You can install the package cloudtoserver and then use the tool to convert the running instance. Example:

# cloudtoserver 

You can also pass optional -d flag which disables the cloud-init service.

Generic

Fedora 21 Make 4.0 Update

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Format Security

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GHC 7.8

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Java 8

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Optional Javadocs

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This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.