Fedora 24 Alpha Delayed, Slackware 14.2 RC 1 Announced

Fedora 24 Alpha due out next Tuesday has been delayed due to blocker bugs. Elsewhere, Patrick Volkerding‎ announced Slackware 14.2 Release Candidate 1 today saying, "We still have a bit of work to do." Mitch Wagner today said that "Open Source is killing us" and Charles Schultz reported on Mageia at SCaLE 14x.

The Fedora 24 alpha has been delayed by a "few days" due to a couple of nasty blocker bugs. One involves a black screen upon logout from KDE. Instead of getting the SDDM or other greeter, the user gets a blank black screen. The other accepted blocker is because Cockpit socket isn't enabled by default on server installs. One proposed blocker that will be decided on or before next week also involves KDE, where one can't unlock the desktop caused by a kscreenlocker crash. So, the two accepted blockers were enough to delay the alpha release. It was decided to try again at next week's Go/No-Go meeting scheduled for March 23. There's been no word on how this may effect the Final nor has the release schedule been updated as of yet. Two major delays have already plagued Fedora 24 development, so they may still be hoping for a June 7 release despite this delay.

Slackware 14.2 RC 1 was released as it were today by BDFL Patrick Volkerding‎ saying, "Let's call this Slackware 14.2 release candidate 1. We still have a bit of work to do before this is fully ready to go, but we're done doing every little upgrade that comes along. Well, mostly."

This release includes Linux 4.4.6, Perl 5.22, and Firefox 45.0.1. It looks like KDE 4.4 will the desktop with Xorg X Server 1.18.2 and GCC 5.3. Patrick doesn't release ISO's of his developmental versions, but AlienBob cooked some up for us.

Charles Schultz today posted photos of Mageia at SCaLE 14x this year. He said they saw a lot of traffic and interest (probably thanks to HP's "magic and tricks show"). Their booth was next to SUSE's and he said they kept an eye on each other booths and show wonderful cooperation between projects. He also said a lot of time was spent reminiscing about Mandrake and Mandriva. A lot of folks "indicated that Mandrake was their first Linux distro." Speaking of Mageia, Linux blogger Mechatotoro wrote today that an upgrade from Mageia 2 to Mageia 5 on an old Toshiba laptop went as smoothly as one could hope and everything worked just fine afterwards. "Good job, Mageia devs!"

Mitch Wagner today said that some vendors are saying that Open Source is killing the service provider industry. He said there are two main problems: there's too much of it to keep up with and it's "hard to compete with free." Wagner suggests the two problems could solve each other with the right perspective.