It’s not just Election Day: Nov. 2 is also release day for Fedora 14. As Red Hat’s community Linux, Fedora 14 brings new development environments and tools, as well as new administration and deployment support.
Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader, said that version 14 is especially relevant for developers, because many new features in this release were built by Red Hat’s own software developers to make their jobs easier.
“A lot of what ended up being new features in Fedora 14 are support for new programming languages,” Smith said. “We now support D. We’ve got support for some Perl 6 and Rakudo, too. There’s also been a lot of debugging work. We’ve got the ability to do a lot of scripting in the Gnu Debugger [GDB]. You can use Python scripting with GDB now. Fedora 14 lets you separate breakpoints with the GDB and then script that with Python to say, ‘Where was memory allocated? Where is it leaking?’ ”
Smith said that Fedora now aims to be a compelling developer desktop choice. To that end, Fedora 14’s repositories include both of Eclipse’s Helios release and NetBeans 6.9.
Deployment configuration and change management should be easier with Fedora 14 as well, he said, because this is the first Fedora release to support OpenSCAP, an open-source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol.
“These are a collection of tools and utilities to help admins of larger groups of system to be able to go through some of the security analysis needed,” said Smith. “They can search for known vulnerabilities and come up with your own custom checklist, like ‘I want to make sure all these passwords meet these criteria.’ There is also the ability to do some scripting from that with Puppet to push out configuration changes or other remediations.”
While Fedora 14 is just now being completed, Smith said the team made an unusual decision to begin work on Fedora 15 even before work on 14 had completed. That’s because the delayed release of the Gnome 3 desktop environment gave the Fedora team the leeway to focus on developer features in 14. Fedora 15 should focus on integrating Gnome 3 and adding some further administration tools.
Gnome 3 is now set for a March release, according to the Gnome Foundation.
