Fedora 8 'Werewolf' Shows Its Fangs - Page 2

Not everything that Fedora had originally planned to be in the Fedora 8 release actually made the cut, though. Among the items left out this time around is the Free IPA (Identity, Policy, Audit) framework, intended to be an easy way for system administrators to install, setup and administer centralized identity management and authentication.

Fedora had hyped Free IPA capacities as recently as this summer.

Spevack blamed the feature's absence in the release on the developers' feeling that it wasn't quite ready when they did a final "feature freeze." Nevertheless, he did say that Free IPA remains part of the overall Fedora project, and it could still end up in the Fedora 9 release, scheduled for 2008.

The Fedora team will be closely watching how many people will end up using Fedora 8, which makes its debut nearly four years to the day after Red Hat launched the first version of Fedora Core.

The group has kept reasonably transparent and accurate usage statistics for its releases since Fedora 6, which topped out at nearly 2.9 million unique installations. Spevack said the Fedora 7 release ended up with about 80 percent of Fedora 6's users, at just over 1.9 million .

Those stats may seem misleading at first: It's not that Fedora lost users, it's actually more likely that users simply don't upgrade for every consecutive release. Spevack said Fedora will be able to draw broader conclusions about uptake with the Fedora 8 release.

"Conventional wisdom is that even release- and odd release-numbered Fedora distro users do their installs every other release," Spevack said.

Uptake will also likely be helped by another factor: the expected end of official support for Fedora 6. Fedora supports each version for only a month after it's succeeded by two subsequent versions -- which means that Fedora 6 users will have only one more month before their distro is no longer supported.

"We've kept track from day one of Fedora 6 and when that hits end-of-life in a month, a lot will upgrade to Fedora 8," Spevack said. "We'll learn if people actually do update every time or every other time. I think we'll see a big number, but we'll find out."

The Fedora team won't be the only ones monitoring the success of the distro, since features from it may ultimately end up in the enterprise.

The project is a freely available community replacement for the legacy Red Hat Linux product, which hit its end-of-life with Red Hat Linux 9 in 2004. Since then, Red Hat has focused its commercial efforts on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) line, which draws on Fedora as a base and development community.

Continuing those efforts, Red Hat yesterday expanded RHEL with new virtualization, on demand and appliance offerings.