Mint 18 Planning, Fedora 24 Delayed, YaST Rewrites
Clement Lefebvre today blogged some early plans for upcoming Linux Mint 18. Codenamed "Sarah" looks to be released towards Summer and will be supported for a very long time. In other news, Phoronix.com spotted a Fedora FESCo ticket requesting a delay in the Fedora 24 development release schedule. Jamie Watson is back with another desktop tutorial, this time the i3 Window Manager. The creator of Mandrake/Mandriva Linux blogged of his experiences with the cloud version of LibreOffice and the openSUSE Yast Team posted of some of the working going into the next version of YaST.
Fedora 24 hasn't even reached Alpha yet and the team knows they are in for a long haul. The upgrade to GCC 6 will require rebuilding the entire codebase and the engineering team would like to push the schedule back by few weeks. Dennis Gilmore, who submitted the ticket, suggested, "Push Fedora 24 out 3-4 weeks and allow for mass rebuild first week of February." He said they may be able to avoid a mass rebuild, but it's better if they do. A lot of packages are going to be contrary about it coupled with expected problems with the Glibc update, thus the request for time in the schedule for the full rebuild. If approved this could push the release of Fedora 24 from its current May 17 release date to mid June. Micheal Larabel, who spotted the ticket, said this might allow time for a few more new features to be added as well.
Clement Lefebvre threw out a few hints in the Mint Monthly News the other day about upcoming Linux Mint 18 saying it'll bring a new package base, a new init system, and a new version of GTK. He also said Mint 18 will finally bring a new theme. Today Lefebvre blogged a few more details. He said version 18 will be codenamed "Sarah" and roughly scheduled for May or June later this year. It will be based on Ubuntu 16.04 and supported until 2021. Work will begin shortly on the new version and more news is promised soon.
The openSUSE Yast Team spends its time fixing and updating YaST system management, but some components are showing their age. In fact, the last two sprints have "been quite focused in looking into the future." Some of the highlights include replacing SCR with "a Ruby gem called Cheetah" and Augeas. All of the puzzle pieces should be hitting Tumbleweed shortly. They're working on a libstorage and partitioning replacement as well. More on this as it becomes available.
In other news:
* A first look at Collabora/LibreOffice online (and a little bit of frustration)
* How to customize your Linux desktop: i3 Window Manager
* The Linux Foundation Announces 2016 Events Schedule