Fedora 25 Beta a GO, Last Chance to Test Before Final

The development cycle of Fedora 25 has suffered two setbacks causing the release dates to slip, the last time with the Alpha. But not today. The release team agreed that the Beta is ready to go on time. This will be the last public build before the Final, so now is the time to report those bugs. Fedora 25 will bring some new features to test, like Ctrl-Shift-e to type in Emoji.

Jan Kurik posted this afternoon to the developers mailing list that the Fedora 25 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting had ended in a Go. There were five accepted blocker bugs earlier but the fixes are in and the team set about deciding on two proposed. The first concerned the Anaconda installer failing on RAID when it's in a "migrating state." It's reproducible by creating a new RAID-1 set and immediate starting the install. However, the team decided that since the install will complete if the user waits for the initial sync to complete it wasn't serious enough to hold up the Beta. They plan on having it fixed for Final as they've already decided it's an accepted Final blocker.

The second was also a RAID bug, but it only shows up on one piece of hardware. Additionally, Adam Williamson said it was "reported late and without sufficient information," so, it too was decided not serious enough to block the Beta. They are planning to investigate further to see if it's a real bug serious enough to block Final.

One of the new features of Fedora 25 isn't actually in the distribution itself. With Fedora 25 the default download path is to send the user to Fedora Media Writer. FMW is a smaller program that allows the user to select desired Fedora flavor then downloads the image and copies it to USB. They figure this will be a lot easier and "lower the barrier for potential users to try and install Fedora." It is hoped to have it ready for this Beta by the time it's released next Tuesday.  Other Downloads will still be available when implemented.

Some other accepted changes include Unicode 9.0 support, upgrading Perl to 5.24 but removing it altogether from the minimal build root, and replacing UDisks2 with Storaged for its enterprise extensions. The default graphic server has been changed to Wayland for Fedora 25 as well, unless something drastic crops up. The Beta is coming October 11 and the Final is due November 15, 2016.