Fedora 7 Test 2 Release Notes
This is the time for all developers, maintainers, and testers to contribute to the Release Notes. See the Process page for details and start editing at today.
This document is a highly abridged version of the release notes used during the test1, test2, and test3 phases of development. The full complement of release notes follow during the test4 phase, according to developer and community participation in the release notes process.
Welcome to Fedora 7 Test 2
Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and guided by the 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 central Fedora project is an operating system and platform based on Linux that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, now and forever.
You can help the Fedora Project community continue to improve Fedora if you file bug reports and enhancement requests. Refer to this page for more information. Thank you for your participation.
To find out more general information about Fedora, refer to the following Web pages:
- Fedora Overview (Overview)
- Fedora FAQ (FAQ)
- Help and Support (Communicate)
- Participate in the Fedora Project (HelpWanted)
Official Announcement
Important Warnings about the Test Release
Problems with mkinitrd
This test release has an rpm ordering issue that seems to affect some people with regard to mkinitrd being installed correctly. If you run into this issue, please try the updates image found at [1] . Refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Updates for more information on using updates images.
Upgrading with PATA Hard Disks
If you are using PATA (parallel or "original" style ATA) hard disks and you attempt to do a manual yum upgrade to this release, you may be unable to boot your system when finished. To avoid this problem, use the installer program (Anaconda) to upgrade your system instead of using yum.
New in Fedora 7 Test 2
This test release includes significant new versions of many key components and technologies. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora.
Merger of Core and Extras
- The Fedora Core and Extras software repositories are being merged, resulting in a shared infrastructure and a single repository of packages to which everyone is invited to contribute.
- Fedora 7 Test 2 is packaged initially as a Desktop/Development Workstation/Server implementation, called "Prime".
- Many more packages are available in the development repositories.
- Three targetted spins are now under discussion: Fedora Prime, Fedora KDE, and Fedora Everything. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureFedoraTargettedSpins for more details.
Live CD
- This test release includes an i386 ISO for a Desktop Live CD. This Live CD features the ability to install to a hard disk using the same graphical Anaconda installer as the non-live CD variant.
Desktop
- This test release features GNOME 2.17.91.
- A brand new Echo icon theme is included as the default in this release. This icon theme is incomplete, but with appropriate feedback and progress, may become the default in the general release.
- KDE and Xfce, among several other packages, are included in the development repositories, but not on the media. They can be installed using the appropriate software management tools.
- Fast User Switching is now available via the fast-user-switch-applet. See Releases/FeatureFastUserSwitching for more details.
Performance
- System performance is generally slower in the test releases as compared to the general release since we enable several options that help with debugging.
System Administration
- System administration tools may be modified under the testing process.
System Level Changes
- Fedora 7 Test 2 features a 2.6.21rc1 based kernel. Current release information is being tracked on the kernel release notes source page.
Amanda
Users who upgrade from older releases need to read the amanda.conf and
amanda-client.conf man pages to learn about the the new syntax for
calling amandad, as well as edit the /etc/xinetd.d/amanda
configuration file to follow the new syntax.
Road Map And Release Schedule
Intended Audience for Test Releases
Test 1 is targeted for developers, who use it "at their own risk", and contains many bleeding edge packages.
Test 2 is for early adopters. Most things should work and we need to your help to find what is broken.
Test 3 is for early adopters. Most things should work and we need to your help to find what is broken.
Test 4 is for beta users. This is the time when we must have full community participation. Without this participation both hardware and software functionality suffers.
Quality Assurance for Test Releases
The Fedora Project has a process in place for ensuring the highest possible quality even in our test releases. Many bugs are identified, prioritized and fixed during the testing process. We also have a list of known bugs in this release. Refer to this page for more details.
Translations of Release Notes
Due to the rapidly changing nature of test releases, translations of release notes for test releases are not practical. The initial goal is to have a translation of the release notes included in the test4 release and to allow community review and correction before the general release. As always, the general release is translated following the established practices for localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n), which result in comprehensive, high-quality release notes in a variety of languages.