Fedora Core 5 Release Summary
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora Core 5. New desktop applications, advances in security, better localization tools, improved software installation and management facilities and strong Java integration help to make Fedora Core 5 the most innovative Linux distribution ever.
Release Notes and Announcement
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-March/msg00027.html
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/fedora5.html
Getting Fedora Core 5
Download ISO Images
Users can download the ISO images of the installation DVD or CD-ROMs now from the Fedora web site.
Online Vendors
We recognize that many people do not have sufficient bandwidth to download an entire operating system. This is one of the reasons that the Trademark Guidelines are written to allow third parties to sell physical media containing Fedora Core, as long as they comply with the guidelines.
Fedora Community Free Media
Fedora Community Free Media, a volunteer initiative under the Fedora Ambassadors Program, distributes Fedora Core media (DVDs) for free to individuals. Local Fedora Ambassadors or Contributors are invited to participate.
What's New In Fedora Core 5
See Fedora Core 5 Now
Fedora Core 5 has an exciting new look and feel. The menus and user interface have been carefully crafted by the interaction designers and desktop team. Take a tour at:
Desktop
Fedora Core 5 features some great new desktop applications powered by Mono.
Tomboy is a note-taking tool; simple and handy, it has already changed the way that some Fedora users and developers work.
http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/
Thanks to F-Spot, managing digital photographs is easier than ever.
If you are looking for something in a chat log, an email, or a web page you visited days ago, Beagle helps you find it.
http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page
We are also pleased to introduce Accelerated Indirect GLX (AIGLX) support in Fedora Core 5. Developed in partnership with the upstream Xorg community, AIGLX provides the foundation for GLX-accelerated effects on a standard desktop. While this can mean eye-catching effects, it also provides a platform for creating a high-performance, efficient, and elegant desktop.
Power management has been improved thanks to GNOME Power Manager, included in this release. The GNOME Screensaver package is included, with a new Fedora screensaver to accompany it.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-power-manager/
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/
Integration, testing, and development was done to verify that suspend and hibernation features work with the largest number of hardware combinations that the Fedora community could get its hands on.
We didn't forget our Apple hardware users, and included support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets in the Fedora Core 5 kernel, which is based on the 2.6.16 kernel release.
http://wiki.kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges
Fedora Core 5 also features updated versions of old favorites. The latest in the Firefox 1.5 series offers improvements in speed, stability, security, and accessibility. The latest OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 introduces OpenDocument support, a new enhanced database frontend, a mail merge wizard, and better PDF export capability. The latest versions of both GNOME 2.14 and KDE 3.5 bring a many new features and improvements to the Fedora desktop.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/releases/1.5.html
http://www.openoffice.org/product/index.html
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/C/
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-3.5.php
Finally, the Fedora Core 5 desktop features new advances in multimedia applications built around the free Xiph.org codecs. Fedora is proud to say that Chris Montgomery, the founder of Xiph.org and the genius behind the Ogg family of codecs, is now a member of the Fedora Core team. We hope that Fedora and Xiph.org form a strong and lasting partnership to further the development of free media formats.
The gnome-mount program uses the freedesktop.org HAL library and provides better flexibility and administration capabalities.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13904
http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1173575,00.html
Software Installation and Management
Anaconda, the Fedora Core installer, has been completely rewritten to present a more streamlined interface that matches the new look and feel of Fedora Core 5.
Fedora Core 5 also brings major advancements in software management with the introduction of Pirut, a graphical interface to replace system-config-packages. Pirut helps manage the large number of software packages available in Fedora Core and Extras repositories. The software package updater, Pup, helps users keep pace with Fedora's rapid improvements.
For the first time, all of Fedora Core's tools for software installation and management share the same strong foundation: the package management utility Yum. This tight integration will lead to dramatic improvements in software management in future Fedora releases.
Xen Virtualization
Xen, the leading open source virtualization project, is included in Fedora Core 5. Our version of Xen is based on the latest Xen 3.0 development branch, with support for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 hardware. Also included is the Xen guest install script from Fedora developers, which allows users to set up virtual machines.
Xen's advances in Fedora Core 5 represent a critical next step in the future of virtualization on Linux. Fedora has expanded our virtualization team with Chris Wright, one of the maintainers of the stable branch of 2.6 kernel releases, and Juan Quintela, as virtualization wizards. They are part of a large Red Hat team, headed by Brian Stein, responsible for making virtualization ubiquitous and seamless in Fedora.
Security
You can always expect interesting and exciting advancements in security from Fedora Core, and this release does not disappoint. Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is now using the reference policy, which makes it easier to create and maintain modular security policies. The introduction of a stack protector to GCC 4.1 makes it harder than ever for attackers to exploit buffer overflows, one of the most common security vulnerabilities.
Security/Features?highlight=(fstack)
Fedora has switched to using the reference policy for the SELinux security framework. This supports binary modules, allowing SELinux policies to move into individual packages. Developers can use this to ship site-specific policy customizations. Fedora Core also supports the Multi Category Security (MCS) SELinux policy by default, in addition to Type Enforcement (TE), Muti Level Security (MLS), and Role Base Access Control (RBAC) security policies. These gains in security continue to make Fedora Core one of the most secure general-use operating systems in the world. Find more facts at:
http://serefpolicy.sourceforge.net/
Linux Unified Key Support (LUKS) provides hard disk encryption support in Fedora Core 5. David Zeuthen of Red Hat, the HAL developer and maintainer, worked on the LUKS integration with HAL and GNOME, finishing just in time for the new Fedora Core release. Hard disk encryption provides one of the best physical security solutions -- protection of your data if your hard disk falls into the wrong hands.
Internationalization and Localization
Fedora contributors speak many different languages besides C, C++, Python, Java, and so on. We are also humans who speak the world's many different languages, and we all want Fedora to support as many as possible.
In Fedora Core 5, we have come closer to that goal by adopting SCIM, in place of IIIMF, as the input method of choice for internationalization. This and other advances allow Fedora to communicate with its many users better than ever before.
Java
This release of Fedora Core represents another big step down the free Java path. Through the introduction of the completely free software stack java-gcj-compat that runs native and bytecode Java, Fedora can now compile and run software written in Java without relying upon proprietary and closed Java machine implementations.
The excellent Fedora Java development team of Red Hat and community developers have built many popular Java-based or Java-using packages utilizing java-gcj-compat for this release. These packages, which include OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Apache Tomcat, and Jakarta, are now compiled and run on a 100% free and open software stack.
We included a complete set of packages and development goodies in Fedora Core 5 for Java technologies. Fedora Extras also has many Java applications: the popular BitTorrent utility Azureus, RSSowl, and others, all powered by gcj-java-compat.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
Under the Hood
The software repositories for the Fedora Legacy community maintenance project are available in this release. Disabled by default, these repositories can easily be re-enabled so that users can keep up with community patches after Fedora Core 5 leaves its official maintenance window.
Fedora Core 5 includes the latest releases of Apache HTTP Web Server 2.2, MySQL 5.0, and PostgreSQL 8.1 with various enhancements.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/new_features_2_2.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-5-0-nutshell.html
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/whatsnew
X.Org has been completely modularized and Fedora Core includes the latest X.Org X11R7.0 in this release. The new modular architecture of R7.0 enables easier driver upgrades and simplifies development, opening the way for rapid improvement in Linux graphics.
GStreamer, the free desktop multimedia framework, has seen major improvements with the 0.10 release, and we made sure that applications such as Totem take full advantage of it.
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
We have the latest version of the GNU Compiler Collection, GCC 4.1, which provides security and performance improvements. We used GCC 4.1 to compile over 6,000 packages in the Fedora Core and Fedora Extras software repositories. GCJ, a critical part of our free Java environment, is included. There is also an implementation of the OpenMP parallel programming standard (http://www.openmp.org/) for C, C++ and Fortran. Use the compiler switch -fopenmp to enable it.
Other improvements are listed at:
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html.
Fedora Core 5 also offers technology previews for SystemTap and Frysk, cutting edge execution analysis tools that will allow developers to troubleshoot performance issues to a degree never before possible.
The Future of Fedora
Fedora contributors are already working toward the next release of Fedora Core, which will feature advancements in Xen, and new integration work from the Fedora Rendering and One Laptop Per Child (a.k.a. $100 laptop) projects. Stateless Linux work is also progressing steadily. We are working on the ability to support Fedora Extras and other custom software repositories during installation. As usual, work continues on new releases of the best and most robust free and open source software. See our roadmap at: