Fedora 24 Beta and RHEL 6.8 Released
Topping the Linux news today was the release of Fedora 24 Beta built with GCC 6 and glibc 2.23 and features GNOME 3.20. Parent company Red Hat announced an update to version 6 bringing "new capabilities and a stable and trusted platform." On the other side of town, Scott Gilbertson posted a detailed review of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu's Michael Hall shared his experiences using Unity 8 exclusively.
Fedora 24 Beta was announced today with requests for testers and bug reports. All versions were upgraded to GCC 6 and glibc 2.23 "providing greater code optimization and improved program error catching." The desktop edition features GNOME 3.20 on top of GTK+ 3. The server includes FreeIPA 4.3 and new smaller footprint. Cloud and Atomic Host editions were released as well as for ARM. There are, as usual, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnamon spins as well. All relevant download links are listed in the announcement. Fedora 24 Final is currently scheduled for June 14. Michael Larabel said today that Fedora 24 is looking nice.
Red Hat today announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 saying, "With enhancements to security features and management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 remains a solid, proven base for modern enterprise IT operations." RHEL 6.8 brings libreswan to enhance security for VPNs, better performance through cached authentication, Relax-and-Recover backup and recovery, and dmstats storage monitor. In related news, Red Hat opens Canberra office.
Canonical's Michael Hall began a 10-day challenge last Friday to use Unity 8 exclusively to see how close it is to being ready. He explained how he set it up before sharing his experience for those looking for tips. He said he wasn't really expecting it to work out and to use it for more than a day, but "I was really quite surprised to find that, once I found the workarounds above, I was not only able to spend the full day in it, but I was able to do so quite easily." However, it wasn't "all unicorns and rainbows." Middle-click paste didn't work and the interface was limited to one window per app. Power management is spotty and volume controls are cranky. Despite those and other drawbacks, Hall states "things are going well" and he plans to finish out the 10-days. Also concerning Ubuntu, Scott Gilbertson gave 16.04 a full examination and found it to be "best release since the good old days of 10.04."
In other news:
* Join Mozilla's New Test Pilot Program
* BitKeeper's open source release
* Milestones in Free and Open Source Software History, 1969-2015