Issue #8 June 2005

Fedora™ Project status report

by Greg DeKoenigsberg

Fedora Core 4 released

The Fedora Project has announced the final release of Fedora Core 4. New features in Fedora Core 4 include GNOME® 2.10, KDE 3.4, and a preview of GCC 4.0. PowerPC is now supported, as well as i386 and x86_64 architectures. Refer to Meet Fedora Core 4 for more details about the new features.

To download Fedora Core 4, visit the downloads page. Traffic may be heavy initially, so be patient. You can also help spread the love by using torrent to get your bits and making them available to others.

Coming soon: Fedora Foundation

At the Red Hat Summit on June 3, Mark Webbink announced Red Hat's intention to create the Fedora Foundation. The Fedora Foundation will be Red Hat's next step in its commitment to building a true open source community around Fedora.

The purpose of the foundation will be to expand collaboration within the community and between the community and outside projects. Red Hat hopes that the foundation will expand to cover many Fedora-related sub-projects with Red Hat continuing to devote significant engineering resources to the overall project.

Red Hat believes the Fedora Project is both an essential part of the open source development cycle that leads to its commercial ventures and a community that does more than consume Fedora as a product. Such a community can best prosper when the needs and wishes of all participants are adequately represented.

Whenever a project changes, there is concern about the future. Red Hat and the leaders of the Fedora Project understand this and value feedback. There are no current plans to change the Fedora Core distribution project, processes, or management; Red Hat will continue to maintain overall control of the project to ensure continued, timely, high quality releases.

In recent months, the Fedora Project has expanded beyond Fedora Core; both the Fedora Extras project and Fedora Documentation project are sustained by extensive community involvement. The Fedora Foundation will be built to further enable community participation.

Much work remains to be done. Look for reports of progress on this important initiative in the coming months.

FUDCon 2, June 24 and 25

FUDCon 2 is nearly here. The schedule for the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers will be at LinuxTag in Karlruhe, Germany. Details are available at the FUDCon 2 website. Attendance at FUDCon 2 is free to anyone attending LinuxTag; visit http://linuxtag.org/ for more information.

The FUDCon staff requests that those who plan to attend FUDCon 2 reply via email to fudcon-register at fedoraproject dot org.

Thanks, and we'll see you in Karlsruhe!

Fedora Extras status

Over 1000 packages are currently available in the Fedora Extras repositories for Fedora Core 4 for i386, x86_64, and ppc. Over 850 packages are currently available for Fedora Core 3 for i386 and x86_64. New maintainers are welcome; the process for becoming a maintainer for Fedora Extras is documented on fedoraproject.org.

There are a number of packages in Fedora Extras that are currently without maintainers. These are listed on fedoraproject.org. The process for claiming maintainership of an orphaned package is also documented on this page.