12 January 2006

Lots of work this week to try to ensure that FC5 test2 is in shape for release next Monday. Thanks to a lot of hard work from a few people, I think we're to a pretty decent tree for the second test release. There's still work to be done, but we've made a lot of progress from test1. Hopefully the efforts will be well-received.

Some of the changes include:

• Use of the new Fedora logo
  
• Package selection is back in the installer :-) It's not quite finished, but it's getting there. There's a higher-level interface I want to show before dropping you into the detailed package selection, but I just didn't quite have enough time with some of the problems which cropped up last week
  
• Everything (or at least, most everything) has been rebuilt with gcc 4.1. Now with even more security features
  
• GNOME 2.13.4. We're taking a pass at including GNOME 2.14 for the final, so this is the work-up to it
  
• Support for dmraid in the installer. This means that the various IDE "hardware" RAIDs should start to be usable. This is an area that can especially use some testing
  
• pup has been joined by pirut, which is the replacement for system-config-packages. It's still a bit early in pirut's life and I'll hopefully manage to get it a lot more fleshed out by not long after test2's release.
  
• SELinux reference policy so that we can support binary policy modules. This will eventually let us start moving more of policy into individual packages (and make it easier for people to ship site-specific policy customizations)
  
• We've added beagle, f-spot and tomboy. Adding these apps has also necessitated adding Mono to Fedora Core. This has gotten a lot of coverage elsewhere, but not necessarily focusing on the apps. They're each very nice and do a good job of improving the experience for the users of our desktop
  
• A ton of bug fixes across a wide array of packages
  

All that and lots and lots more... it's good stuff. When test2 is released, take it for a spin. And if you find problems, report them via bugzilla so they can be looked at and fixed in time for the final release. Especially since from here, the focus is largely on fixing those bugs, although there are still a few things which need to be finished and also a bit of that final bit of polish.