Fedora Core 6 (FC 6) is now available, offering Red Hat
users a view of the latest and greatest in open source technologies.
It could also be seen as a preview of what is coming in Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL) 5, though Fedora is now a well-established Linux
distribution in its own right.
The somewhat delayed FC 6 release follows version 5 by seven months, and it comes just days ahead of the next Ubuntu release, an event
that the Fedora project leader has called coincidental.
The new release includes support for the AIGLX graphics framework which is Red Hat’s competitive project to Novell’s XGL.
AIGLX provides enhanced 3-D graphics capabilities by leveraging the power of graphics acceleration hardware.
Performance is also improved in FC 6 by as much as 50 percent, thanks to
dynamic linking for application using DT_GNU_HASH.
And security is made a bit easier with a new graphical troubleshooting tool for SELinux. First introduced in Fedora Core 2 in 2004, SELinux implements mandatory access controls on the kernel.
FC 6 will also improve upon its support for Xen Virtualization, which was
introduced in the current Fedora Core 5 build.
FC 6 includes a GUI virtualization manager that makes it easier than before to setup and manage virtual machines.
Max Spevack, Red Hat’s Fedora project leader, told internetnews.com
that the GUI virtualization manger is the missing piece in the
virtualization puzzle.
He said there is a huge proportion of users that
have heard about virtualization, but have been unable to take advantage of
it since it hasn’t been very user friendly.
The new GUI virt-manger in FC 6
changes that and makes virtual machine creation user-friendly.
It’s likely that the new GUI virtualization manager will also be part of Red
Hat’s upcoming RHEL 5 release, according to Spevack.
RHEL 5 is expected by the end of this year and will compete with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, which was released earlier this year.
“I can only assume that the plan is for it to be in RHEL 5,” Spevack said. “I don’t think the plan would have been to only build for Fedora and not put
it in RHEL.”
In an interview with internetnews.com earlier this year, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said that Red Hat was using Fedora as an alpha or beta for RHEL.
It’s something that Fedora’s Spevack said makes him cringe.
“The way I would prefer to say it, and I honestly believe it to be true, is
that Fedora is what it is on its own.”
Spevack added that Fedora Core 5 has had over half a million
downloads and is used to power a number of big-name sites, including
Wikipedia.
“To call it a beta is an incomplete description,” Spevack said. “It
just so happens that when Red Hat is getting ready to do an Enterprise Linux
release, they take Fedora and use it as a departure point. But that’s a lot
different that saying it’s a beta.”
Fundamentally, the relationship between a Fedora release and a RHEL release
has a lot to do with timing.
Spevack said that the Fedora release cycle is
typically every six months while the RHEL cycle is 18 to 24 months. This
means that there are several Fedora releases for every RHEL release. RHEL 4
was released in February 2005.
Most Fedora releases are not released
ahead of RHEL releases but when they are, there is a direct effect.
“We had to be a little more conservative in FC 6 just because a lot of the
code is shared between Fedora and RHEL and we wanted to make sure that it’s
as high quality as possible to make the building of RHEL 5 as easy as
possible,” Spevack said.
The timing of the FC 6 release also just happens to coincide with the
expected release this week of the next Ubuntu Linux, code-named Edgy Eft.
Fedora has faced increasing competition
from Ubuntu in recent years, as Ubuntu’s community following grows.
Spevack insisted however that the release of FC6 in the same week as Ubuntu
Edgy is just a coincidence.
“I didn’t even realize that they were doing a release,” Spevack said.
Fedora isn’t really in competition with Ubuntu in the larger scheme of
things, according to Spevack, so the releases shouldn’t necessarily be
measured against each other on a feature-by-feature basis.
“I don’t think of it as some kind of competition, and I don’t want to arm wrestle [Ubuntu founder] Mark Shuttleworth or anything like that,”
Spevack said.
“I’m interested in having people use open source software, and
it’s important to remember that there is a larger target of proprietary
closed software, and that’s what we need to be keeping our eye on instead of
keeping an eye on each other.”
