Fedora Core 5 is out of the hat

The latest Fedora Core Linux version was released last week by Red Hat, giving users a peek at what to expect in the Linux vendor’s commercial Red Hat Linux release, expected later this year.

Fedora Core 5 – the free, pre-production version of Red Hat’s Linux distribution – includes improvements in desktop look-and-feel as well as performance. Users also get several choices for the kind of open source desktop they want to run. The latest versions of popular open source software bundles are wrapped into the release. Changes were also made to system security, new administration tools, and – as always with a major new rev number – several nits, kinks and bugs were squeezed out of the previous release.

The new Fedora includes GNOME 2.14 and KDE 3.5.1, giving users a choice of desktop operating environments – both of which Fedora developers say will run faster and more smoothly on the new operating system. OpenOffice 2.0.2 is in there, as is Apache HTTP Server 2.2.

As reported in a newsletter last week, the open source Xen virtualization code is now part of Fedora Core. This will allow users to run multiple instances of virtual Linux machines on a single hardware platform.

For security, Fedora Core now uses the SELinux Reference Policy as the engine for creating and implementing polices on SELinux in Fedora. (SELinux is a secure Linux package that segregates system processes and applications to guard against buffer overflow attacks, and other hacks that exploit weaknesses in an application to gain control of the whole operating system or other apps, and is packaged with Fedora.) The SELinux Reference Policy is a project to create easy-to-use and easily-deployed polices for SELinux servers, and Fedrora Core 5 is now using this framework.

As for the nits and kinks that were worked out, Linux laptop users will have an easier time plugging in PC cards, with a new PCMCIA framework added to Fedora. The “hibernate” feature has also been improved, allowing the operating system to be suspended to RAM more efficiently and making it less-likely to hang.

To learn more about Fedora here, go to: https://fedoraproject.org

To see some dogs running on the beach, go to: https://fedora.org/