Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Alpha Release Notes

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What is Fedora?

Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and guided by contributors. These projects are developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards. The center piece of the Fedora project is an operating system that is released twice a year, and is based on the Linux kernel, that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.

To find out more information about Fedora, refer to the following Web pages:

• Fedora Overview
• Fedora FAQ
• Help and Support
• Join Fedora!

Formal Announcement

• https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2008-August/msg000XX.html

What Is The Alpha Release?

The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

You can find the official release announcement here.

How To Try Alpha

Thanks to the infrastructure that was developed during the Fedora 7 release cycle, Alpha is accompanied by live CDs of both the GNOME and KDE desktops, making testing possible without installing any software on an existing system. As the Alpha release is largely targeted at developers and contains many bleeding edge packages, this is the best method for less experienced users who want to get involved with testing.

Alpha images can be downloaded from any of our mirrors. Remember that live images can be used on USB media via the 'livecd-iso-to-disk' utility available in the livecd-tools package on existing Fedora systems. Refer to the USB How-to for more instructions.

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Release Schedule And Feature Details

Development continues on Rawhide during and after the Alpha release, leading up to the Beta and Release Candidate before the final release. The links below provide the release schedule for both the pre-releases and the final release, as well as the wiki pages for the various features planned for inclusion in Fedora 10 where their progress can be tracked.

• Feature List
• Schedule

Providing Feedback

As mentioned above, the Alpha release provides an opportunity for the wider community to begin testing the next release of Fedora. You help the Fedora Project continue to improve Fedora when you file bug reports and enhancement requests. These links explain what needs testing for the Alpha release and allow you to submit your feedback:

• Alpha Testing Details
• Bugzilla Bug Reports

Release Overview

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 10, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress. Also, throughout the release cycle, there are interviews with the developers behind key features giving out the inside story.

Features for this release are tracked on the feature list page.

Desktop

• Artistic 1.0 License Removal -- Remove all packages licensed under only the Artistic 1.0 license.
• Better support for infrared remote controls -- Make it easier to connect to remote controls and have them just work with many applications.
• Wireless connection sharing -- Enable adhoc network sharing.
• Glitch free audio -- Rewrite the PulseAudio sound server to use timer-based audio scheduling
• OpenChange -- Natively access Microsoft Exchange Server using OpenChange.
• Features/BetterWebcamSupportBetter -- Improved webcam support.

System

RPM 4.6

• Features/RPM4.6 -- Update RPM to 4.6, which includes many enhancements and bugfixes.

Boot up

The graphical boot up system used in previous Fedora versions is being replaced with a new system called Plymouth. There are a few issues with Plymouth in the Alpha:

• The graphical boot splash screen that comes with Plymouth requires kernel mode setting drivers that are not shipped in the Alpha. To see the graphical plugin before the drivers land in rawhide, add vga=0x318 to the kernel grub command line. This uses vesafb, which won't necessarily give you the native resolution for your flat panel, and may cause flickering or other weird interactions with X. Without vga=0x318, Plymouth uses a text-based plugin that is plain but functional.
• Plymouth hides boot messages. To view boot messages, press the [Esc] key during boot, or view them in /var/log/boot.log after boot up.
• If you mistype your password on your encrypted root filesystem, Plymouth crashes quietly, giving no indication what went wrong. This is a known issue that is fixed post-Alpha.
• Plymouth doesn't behave well with {{{fsck}}} and maintenance mode login shells in the Alpha.
• Plymouth has other assorted problems. It can be disabled by removing rhgb from the kernel command line.

Security audit

• Security Audit -- A new security audit system and intrusion detection system that includes a new UI, libraries, and tests.

Development

Objective CAML (OCaml) coverage greatly extended

• Fedora 10 contains the OCaml 3.10.2 advanced programming language and a very comprehensive list of packages.

Improved Haskell support

• Haskell support -- provide good support for Haskell development and use, with a high number of quality libraries and tools available.