Red Hat, Fedora, & CentOS - and More

With Red Hat's public release of version 7 Release Candidate, some folks are putting it through its paces. Phoronix has some benchmarks and preliminary remarks. Also, Jay Lyman looks further into the recent Red Hat CentOS cooperation agreement. In other news, a new beginners Linux course has emerged, Shuttleworth named the next Ubuntu, and a review of Puppy Arcade 11 is highlighted.

Phoronix.com has covered the release of Red Hat Enterprise 7 Release Candidate first by saying its "looking fantastic." Micheal Larabel said "there's been a lot of polishing happening" since the beta and it feels all revved up and "ready to go with providing a very nice experience from installation to benchmarking." When benchmarking Larabel found improved performance in some key areas. He also said Red Hat 7 RC ships with "Linux 3.10 kernel, X.Org Server 1.15.0, Mesa 9.2.5, and GCC 4.8.2. GNOME 3.8 is the default desktop." Larabel also covered the new features approved by the steering committee today for Fedora 21.

In other Red Hat news, Jay Lyman examines the CentOS and Red Hat merger deal announced a few months ago. He says it was interesting for several reasons, the first illustrating the "continued presense of power of unpaid community Linux distributions like CentOS. Second, it's part of the changing Linux market, which is being driven by cloud computing and new types of uses on the rise. Third, it also may be a sign that open source software users and customers are exerting more influence than ever before."

Mark Shuttleworth, who needs no introduction, yesterday announced the codename of the next release of Ubuntu. After quite a bit of alliteration, he encouraged developers to get going on "utopic unicorn."

Sam Varghese at www.itwire.com spoke to Shawn Powers about a new Linux newbie training course by the Linux Professional Institute. Powers told Varghese, "The Linux Essentials certification, much like its bigger brothers, LPIC-1, LPIC-2, & LPIC-3, are designed to be distribution agnostic. Linux Essentials covers things which are assumed prerequisites for those other certification programmes."

Finally today, Gary Newell, the Everyday Linux User, reviewed Puppy Arcade 11 saying, "Puppy Arcade is designed for fun. It includes emulators for every games console imaginable as well as ROM loading software and joystick calibration." He tested it inside and out and said while it shows improvement over 10, "Puppy Arcade provided me with a number of challenges over the past week" and "is clearly a hobby project."