The Fedora Project today announced that the latest version of
its distribution, Fedora 7, is now available. The Fedora Project
provides the best of next-generation open source technologies and,
in its latest version, features a new build capacity that allows
for the creation of custom distributions. Fedora 7 now offers a
completely open source build process that greatly simplifies the
creation of appliances that can be targeted to meet individual
needs.
“Fedora 7 development has focused on improving the manner in
which all Fedora releases will be made,” said Max Spevack, Fedora
Project Leader at Red Hat. “Beyond the usual set of upstream
changes and improvements, our latest release is by far the most
exciting and flexible to date. With our new open source build
process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater
influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create
appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly
powerful.”
Fedora 7 provides the first appliance development platform that
is 100 percent open source with an entirely free distribution build
toolchain. The Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version
control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and
the distributions are built with an external, open source compose
tool that allows access by the entire Fedora community.
Through Fedora 7, the community is given an enhanced role that
encourages greater openness and collaboration. As a result of its
flexible, public build environment, Fedora 7 provides users with
the ability to customize like never before. With these
capabilities, combined with live CD, DVD and USB technology, the
possibilities for appliance creation are endless. After
customization, Fedora can be loaded onto various forms of bootable
media, allowing users to run their operating system without a hard
disk installation.
Fedora 7 features Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Qemu
virtualization technologies in addition to Xen. All implementations
can be managed using the Fedora graphical virtualization
manager.
The Fedora 7 release also marks a significant milestone in
Fedora’s emergence as a leading community-driven project. Formerly,
the packages in Fedora Core were maintained only by Red Hat
employees, while the packages in Fedora Extras were maintained by
community members. Fedora 7 does away with this distinction; the
new single Fedora repository is accessible to Red Hat employees and
community members alike, giving the community more influence over
Fedora than ever before.
For more information on Fedora, to download or to join this
community effort, please visit: http://fedoraproject.org.
Fedora-Announce List: A Few Words About Fedora 7
My fellow Fedorans,
In a few hours (about 10:00 AM EDT/2:00 PM GMT), Fedora 7 will
go live to the world.
It’s the middle of the night in the main Red Hat offices in
Raleigh and Westford, but I am in Berlin this week for LinuxTag,
which is the largest Linux conference in Europe (10,000 visitors
over 4 days).
We have a great looking Fedora booth, and we are holding a
FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) here today during
which we have a conference hall that probably seats 150 people all
to ourselves. We are giving speeches and talks about Fedora all day
long, both in German and in English. I’ve already had several
people come by asking when Alan Cox will be arriving. Answer: Real
Soon Now.
We have several activities ongoing at the Fedora booth,
including an install-fest, and a troubleshooting contest with
prizes that include free books and free Red Hat training classes.
We have all variety of Fedora swag as well. It’s quite an
impressive setup here at LinuxTag, and worth noting that the entire
organizational force behind the event was driven by our Fedora
Ambassador community of volunteers.
This email is my “personal” Fedora 7 release announcement, and
also touches on some of the topics that I will mention during my
speech at FUDCon today.
Before I talk about Fedora 7, it’s useful to look at recent
history. One of the Fedora Project’s mottos is “the rapid progress
of free and open source software.” With Fedora Core 5 in March of
2006, Fedora Core 6 in October of 2006, and Fedora 7 today, that’s
about 7 months per release. And with several million Fedora Core 6
installs, everyone who works on Fedora should feel very proud that
not only is the software being released often, but it’s also high
quality, and in high use around the world.
Fedora 7 represents the culmination of several goals that Fedora
has spent the last few releases (spanning the course of at least 2
years) working to achieve.
I’ve written previously on this list about the aspects of Fedora
7 that I think are the most important
(http://tinyurl.com/yuc7ax).
From my perspective, it is the fundamental infrastructure
changes that Fedora 7 represents that are the biggest
achievement.
The entire Fedora toolchain has been freed. Every step in the
distribution-building process is completely open.
Code checked into an external CVS. Packages built on a
completely external build system. Distros and LiveCDs built on
completely open compose tools.
All of this functionality is available via the command line or
via a graphical tool that is build on the APIs that we provide.
For folks who hack on free software, I hope that this is a
compelling development environment in which to work. For folks who
are end users of free software, we believe that the Fedora
toolchain allows people to remix Fedora, and customize it in ways
that will provide a much wider variety of Fedora-based spins than
we could ever offer if “Fedora Release Engineering” had to build
them all directly.
There is plenty more, but this email isn’t meant to be an
exhaustive list of Fedora 7 release features.
Additionally, I’d like to mention a few other new things that
Fedora has completed in time for Fedora 7:
Our home page, fedoraproject.org has a new look. We’ve added a
series of static HTML pages that sit on top of our wiki, and I
think it makes the initial experience of fedoraproject.org much
simpler, and much more useful. The organized chaos of the wiki is
all still just one click away, but we didn’t want first-time
visitors to fp.o overwhelmed with the wiki from the first
instant.
Our documentation pages have also been given some new
organization, living at docs.fedoraproject.org.
The lifespan of a Fedora release has been increased to “two
releases plus one month”. This means that Fedora Core 6 will
continue to be updated until one month after Fedora 8 is released,
and Fedora 7 will be updated until one month after Fedora 9 is
released.
We’ve put into production new mirror management software.
The EPEL project, which aims to make packages from the Fedora
repository available for Enterprise Linux customers, has been
making tremendous progress.
The Fedora News team, which already had been doing a fantastic
job, has expanded the coverage that they provide the Fedora
Project, and their Fedora Weekly News reports offer people a
fantastic summary of all the interesting things that are happening
in the Fedora Project.
And more.
Finally, a few words of thanks. I debated for a while listing
specific names in this email, but the number of people who deserve
credit for Fedora 7 and all of the work that has happened around
Fedora 7 cannot be enumerated without accidentally forgetting
someone. So instead I will simply say that every item discussed in
this email has happened as a result of tremendous work by Fedora
contributors both inside and outside of Red Hat. And it is the
partnership of Red Hat and the Fedora community that allows both
groups to be successful.
And I speak for everyone at Red Hat when I say that it is an
honor to be a part of something like Fedora.
Congratulations to everyone on today’s release.
Sincerely,
Max Spevack
Fedora Project Leader