Bugs Delay Fedora Core 6 Linux Release

Published: October 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The people behind the Fedora Core development implementation of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution said late last week that they would be holding up the release of Fedora Core 6 until October 17 to wrestle with some show-stopper bugs.

Jesse Keating, who is the release engineer for the Fedora Project, explained in an e-mail that the biggest issues behind the delay were related to a possible corruption bug in the ext3 file system. The Fedora team is also looking into why installations on machines with 256 MB of RAM stall, and said that iSCSI drivers were not functional, that kernels for the PowerPC platform relating to SE Linux had some update issue, and that there were packing issues on 64-bit Power and X64 platforms. Keating added that there were other issues and bugs that the Fedora team was chasing down as well, but these were the biggies.

If you want to keep an eye on when Fedora Core 6 comes out, you can get the latest-greatest schedule at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule. Fedora Core 6 Test 3, which bears the 5.92 release moniker, was put out on September 14 for 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, 32-bit PowerPC, and 64-bit PowerPC platforms. The delayed release of Fedora Core 6 that comes out on October 17 is expected to be the last in the Fedora Core 6 line, and has been in code freeze for quite a while.

It bears stating that delays in Fedora Core have no relation to shipment dates for Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is still expected by year's end.