* Red Hat releases Fedora Core 4
Red Hat last week released Fedora Core 4, the latest update to its “free” version of Red Hat Linux and the first update to the software package in seven months.
The update includes many improvements in the areas of security, user interface, applications and includes support for more new hardware platforms, as well as multi-operating system PCs running Fedora Linux and others.
At the system level, Fedora Core 4 includes support for Xen, a virtual machine technology that allows multiple operating systems to run alongside Linux on the same hardware. This could allow users to run Fedora Core 4 in one “sandboxed domain,” as the software developers call it, and have other Linux versions, FreeBSD, Unix or even Windows running in other domains.
Users will also have the option of running such multiple operating systems on PowerPC (PPC) machines, with support for the IBM’s CPU now added to the software. (Forget Apple, PPC; Linux still loves ya.)
Red Hat’s Global File System is also thrown into the Fedora mix. The GFS software allows Linux servers to cluster disk space across a network as one virtual pool of storage.
For security, the SE Linux security architecture included in Fedora 3 has been expanded in the latest version, offering the ability to segment and partition more applications and system daemons from each other to prevent such hacks as buffer overflows attacks, which take advantage of weak separation between Linux applications and services.
The user interface of Fedora core has also been upgraded to support the latest GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4 desktop environments. Among the new applications included in Fedora 4 to run in these environments are OpenOffice 2.0, which the developers claim provides better Microsoft Office compatibility, and a new open source personal database software called Base.
Other productivity apps in the new Fedora include Evince, a multiple-format document viewer with PDF and postscript support, and the Eclipse multi-language software development environment.
