Fedora 18 Alpha PPC release notes

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General Information

Download Fedora 18 Alpha PPC now
To download Fedora 18 Alpha PPC, visit http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/18-Alpha/ or one of the mirrors https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/18-Alpha/ppc64/. Download is available via direct download. This release is available for 64-bit Power PC platforms. Note that Fedora uses SHA256 instead of MD5 or SHA-1 to verify images in a more secure way. For more information, refer to #How_to_Try_Alpha on this page.

Filing Bug Reports

Please file bug reports on this Alpha release if you find any problems.

Known Issues

Refer to the Common F18 bugs page for a listing of issues, and any known resolutions, commonly found with this release. This page is maintained throughout the Fedora 18 developmental cycle.

Also refer to the release notes for all architectures here: Fedora_18_Alpha_release_notes

Known PPC Issues

Installation

• Due to a missing check in lorax the install images are currently being built with a ppc64p7 kernel, so booting the install images on anything smaller than Power7 will fail at the moment. This is something we're going to fix asap after Alpha, so for Beta and RC the install images will again contain the generic ppc64 kernel. A possible workaround for older systems is to skip the install via anaconda and update a Fedora 17 to a Fedora 18 Alpha.

• Installation fails on multipath devices.

• If you want to install graphically using vnc, you must pass the 'inst.vnc' parameter to anaconda at boot time. The screen to start vnc is no longer in anaconda.

• It is not required to set the root password in the anaconda installer. However, there is a defect where the firstboot utility is not performed in text console boot after install. Therefore, you must set the root password during install

GRUB2

• Grub2 has a limit of 64 bytes for the device path. If you have a device with a path longer than 64 characters you will not be able to boot your system from such device. This will be fixed on Beta. For more info see Bug 857305

• No grub2 modules are loaded on network boot. This makes commands like 'help' and 'linux' to be unavailable and the system won't boot. To workaround this issue you can explicitly load the modules in the grub.cfg file using the 'insmod' command. This will be fixed on Beta. For more info see Bug 857936

Runtime

• the ppc64p7 subarch is installed on power7 systems by default. This means that some rpms can end in ppc64.rpm pp64p7.rpm. Yum currently has a defect where it, under certain conditions, cannot reconcile the subarchs vs generic rpms properly. See bug -> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859202

• The current development packages are still in the progress of being signed. In case you only want to test and install packages from the Fedora 18 Alpha PowerPC repository you have to do the following steps:
  • Put a "#" before the mirrorlist= line in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo in the [fedora] section
  • Replace the #baseurl= line with the following: baseurl=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/test/18-Alpha/Fedora/ppc64/os/ in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo in the [fedora] section
  • Run the command yum clean all

Release Overview

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open sourced 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 18, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress. Features for this release are tracked on the feature list page.

The Purpose of the Alpha Release

This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 18. The software has bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.

You have an important part to play in this release. Install Fedora 18 Alpha PPC release, then try using a few applications or activities that are important to you. If it doesn't work, file a bug, but make sure to set the 'Hardware' field to 'powerpc'. This release gives the wider community a set of code to test against as a very important step in the process of making a solid Fedora 18 release. You can make the Fedora 18 release better by testing this release and reporting your findings.

What's New in Fedora 18 Alpha PPC

There are several new features in Fedora 18 that warrant being called out.

• ppc64p7 subarch support. For Power7 and higher specially optimized versions of several important applications and libaries, improving performance of them on Power7 machines by up a large amount.

• The installer uses tmux to switch between the installer window, a bash prompt, and other windows which capture log files. Read more about tmux here: http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

• The installer's command line parameters are changing. Read more about the change here: http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/doc/boot-options.html

• The name of the package group has changed from @base to @standard. This will affect kickstart files as well.

Additional Information

The Fedora 18 Alpha PPC release is a Secondary Arch release. More information about this specific architecture can be found here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC

The developers working on it typically hang out on the FreeNode IRC channel #fedora-ppc and we do have a architecture specific mailinglist for Power PC on Fedora here:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/ppc

How to Try Alpha

• Simply install it via the DVD or the netboot images
• Boot it!
• Run it!
• Test it!
• Write bugs!

Verify Fedora

Fedora does not publish MD5 or SHA1 hashes to verify images since they are not secure enough. Instead we have been using SHA256 since Fedora 11. In Linux, you can use sha256sum command (part of coreutils and installed by default) to verify the Fedora image

sha256sum -c *-CHECKSUM

Windows can use the free to download utility HashCalc.

Mac OS X can use the free to download utility hashtab.

Fedora GPG signatures can be verified following the instructions here

Debugging Information And Performance

Fedora kernels have many extensive debugging options during the developmental cycle that have a negative impact on performance but provide developers with more information automatically, in the case of bug reports. If you are running performance analysis on Rawhide or test releases such as Alpha or Beta, make sure you take this into account.

Fedora 18 Release Schedule And Feature Details

Development continues on Rawhide during and after this release, leading to the beta, then the final release. The links below provide the release schedule for both the pre-releases and the final release, as well as the wiki's pages for tracking the various features planned for inclusion in Fedora 18.

• Feature List
• Schedule