Red Hat Puts Out Fedora 7 Community Release

Published: June 5, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With Enterprise Linux 5 off and running in the market, it is time for Red Hat and the community of developers behind this variant of the Linux platform to start building what will eventually become Enterprise Linux 6. That development happens through the Fedora Project, which launched Fedora 7 last week.

The Fedora Project has been changing over the past several years, moving away from a development model controlled largely by Red Hat and with a core Linux product--called Fedora Core comprised of about 2,500 programs--and all of the thousands of add-ons that end up in a typical set of Linux distributions--called Fedora Extras, which make up about 3,000 additional programs. As the Fedora Project has merged the Core and Extra products, starting first with the Fedora Core 6 release in October 2006, it has also been creating a more sophisticated build system for what is now called simply Fedora 7. With Fedora Core 6, the Anaconda program installer was made network aware, so that the programs normally included from what used to be called the Extras stack could be downloaded directly from the site projects where they really reside. This always ensured that the latest-greatest variant of the code could be used with Fedora Core 6.

According to Max Spevack, leader of the Fedora Project and an employee of Red Hat, the big change with Fedora 7 is that the entire build process that Red Hat used to control internally--from the content versioning system and source code repository, through the build system that makes Red Hat Program Manager (RPM) files, to the composing tool that makes full Linux distributions with different stacks of software--is completely open and transparent. This is done through a tool called Revisor, which is a wizard to build a Fedora 7 instance running on a LiveCD or USB memory stick, or a set of ISO files on CDs for a desktops, servers, or appliances.

"You can now remix your own Fedora without any technical knowledge," says Spevack. "We envision people wanting to build a Fedora system using KDE instead of Gnome, or maybe one that is completely in Portuguese. This allows local communities and individuals to build a Fedora instance that is perfect for their own needs."

The Fedora 7 repository has somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 programs in it, according to Spevack. The Fedora Project is going to create a LiveCD distribution using Revisor that fits within the 700 MB capacity limit of a CD and which contains the basics of Fedora 7. The project will also create a Fedora Everything version, which as the name suggests, will have everything all packed into ISOs on CDs.

Fedora 7 has an applet that allows for security patches to be automatically applied to the stack of programs, and notifies users of when they need patches. But Fedora 7 does not plug into the Red Hat Network, the official for-fee support network for the Enterprise Linux distros that give Red Hat the bulk of its money. Red Hat does not offer paid-for support for Fedora, but Spevack says that it is an idea that he is entertaining along with other Red Hat execs now that virtualization and other technologies have been integrated into Linux and the community build system behind Fedora is now largely complete.

Fedora 7 will also include fast-switching between user accounts, which is painfully slow in Linux and Windows. The latest Beryl and Compiz 3D graphical user interfaces are also in the release. Linux enthusiasts will get a test of a project called Nouveaux, which is a group of programmers who are creating a set of open source drivers for nVidia graphics cards; nVidia only supplies closed source drivers, which complicates the way Linux distributors have to handle them and still stay within the confines of the GNU General Public License that governs a lot of the Linux software stack. Spevack says that these open source nVidia drivers are not ready for production yet, but people can play around with them and help out with the debugging. Fedora 7 will also include Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and QEMU virtualization technologies alongside of the Xen hypervisor that was woven into Fedora Core 6 last year and into RHEL 5 this year.

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