Related link: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/test/4.90/

The first test release of Fedora Core 5 provides an intriguing glimpse of what’s coming down the pipe next February (or, perhaps, March). There’s still a lot of sawdust and sharp edges, but there are some obvious improvements over FC4:

  • The installation uses logical volume management (LVM) by default. This is great technology and far superior to traditional partition managment — it’s good to see it in the defaults. To go along with this, there’s a very nice graphical tool for post-installation LVM management.

  • A complete switchover to yum for package management, and the new Package Updater (pup) tool takes over from up2date.

  • Lots of X11 changes: X11R7-RC2 has replaced X11R6.8.2. This means the end of the /usr/X11R6 hierarchy, the appearance of the X server and utilities in /usr/bin, new directories such as /usr/share/X11, the ability to install a reduced subset of X functionality if desired, and the debut of the evdev driver and -noswitchvt options which provide the ability to support multiple local X users out of the box (well, with a bit of configuration :-).

  • Gnome personal file sharing through WebDAV and mDNS/Rendezvous. Turn it on, plunk some files in ~/Public, and find them in Nautilus anywhere else on the network (what other clients will pick up a WebDAV share advertised via Rendezvous?).

  • Version bumps on most apps (of course!).

  • Lots and lots of little fixes and improvements. gdmflexiserver reliably does what it should (even when invoked by KDE), hardware detection and driver support seem to have been improved (at least on my laptop), and many annoyances are fixed up.

  • Some cosmetic changes: the Desktop menu is gone, replaced by System, and the System Settings submenu has been replaced by the Administration submenu. There’s a very cool new wait cursor, and the Gnome screensaver has been reworked.

I haven’t had a chance to look at all of the changes yet - including Xen and SELinux - but I look forward to checking them out over the next week.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on the installer and package manager renovations, but overall, it looks great. Congratulations to the whole Fedora team and the upstream developers!

What’s your take on Fedora Core 5?