Fedora Core 5 was released today. I started downloading it this morning, and it should be done this afternoon. I’ll probably start updating the Fedora boxes at work later this week, though for my home system I may wait until RPMForge catches up.
Meanwhile, I’m reading the release notes, and found one item particularly interesting:
There are new experimental drivers that provide support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets (http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/).
Fedora Core is following the path blazed by the Linux kernel: having started out as primarily an x86-based project (the 32-bit Intel-based processors from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Athlon), it’s branching out. Versions 2 and 3 added support for the AMD-64 chips (basis of the Opteron and Athlon 64), and now, with the first test release of Fedora Core 4, official support for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC.
There was a side project already, and most of the pieces that go into a Linux distribution have reached the point where they’re (mostly) platform-independent—all you need to do is recompile them. It takes fine-tuning, of course, and the actual hardware support takes effort. Yellow Dog Linux started out porting Red Hat to the PowerPC so it would run on Macs, and now builds a solid distribution off of Fedora Core, including a high-end server OS targeted for IBM’s PowerPC servers.
It’ll be interesting to compare upcoming versions of Yellow Dog and Fedora Core now that the latter is working on an actual PPC release.
Netcraft’s ongoing web server survey has found Fedora Core usage growing 122% over the past 6 months, nearly three times the growth rate of any other Linux distribution they surveyed. (Gentoo was second with 45% growth). In absolute numbers, Red Hat remains #1 with Debian as #2. Red Hat itself is dropping slowly, having lost 1.2%. I would assume that those are switching to a mix of Fedora Core, Debian, SuSE and RHEL clones like CentOS or White Box Linux. There’s a nice graph in the article that shows the trend more clearly.
And that’s just web servers.
Tell me again how everyone’s abandoning Fedora Core in the wake of the Red Hat/Fedora split?
Next week is going to be interesting.
It starts Monday with the anticipated release of Fedora Core 3, which is expected to form the base of Red Hat’s next Enterprise Linux. I’ve got quite a few systems running Fedora Core 2 between home and work, and while I won’t be upgrading everything at once, it looks like it should be less painful than the upgrade from 1 to 2.
Then there’s two releases on Tuesday. Most anticipated is the final release of Firefox 1.0. I’ve lost count of the systems I’ve installed Firefox on, and I’m very much looking forward to 1.0!
Finally, also Tuesday, is the monthly collection of Microsoft security patches. Off to the land of installations and reboots!
Of course, Mandrake released a new version last week, Apple posted a minor update to Mac OS yesterday, and Yellow Dog Linux just released 4.0, so it’s definitely upgrade season.
Well, it looks like Fedora Core 1 is scheduled to expire in about a month, when the second test release of Fedora Core 3 comes out. At that point, the Fedora Legacy team will take over producing security updates.
It’s been an interesting ride. Fedora 1 had very few problems, was more advanced than Red Hat 9 and more stable than Red Hat 8. I’ve had some problems with Fedora 2, but aside from upgrading snafus they’ve all been direct results of the switch to the new Linux kernel series. (New sound system: sound always starts out muted. New USB drivers: one system requires me to unplug and reconnect the scanner after turning it on.)
At this point I’m not running Fedora 1 anywhere, and I’d probably use Fedora 2 (or 3 when it’s ready), Debian, or FreeBSD for new servers (although I’d need more practice with BSD before going that last route).
As for desktops, I keep planning to try out Mandrake Linux 10, but I still haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe I’ll install it, or SuSE 9.1, on the system with the scanner problem.
