The Fedora Project team is working very hard on the next version of Fedora Linux distribution (Fedora 7) and they published some of the upcoming changes for this release.

The biggest change will be the merger of "Core" and "Extras" repositories into one huge repository of thousands of packages. Also, Fedora 7 will come in three editions: Fedora Desktop (which is a collection of desktop-related packages like GNOME, X, Firefox, etc.), Fedora Server (which is a collection of server-related packages like LAMP stack, maybe JBoss, etc.) and Fedora KDE (which will contain only the K Desktop Environment packages). They are also planning an installable LiveCD release of F7.

Other new features will include:

￭ Rock solid wireless networking support;
￭ Wireless firmware;
￭ Pungi will be used for tree building;
￭ Fast user switching;
￭ RandR 1.2;
￭ KVM virtualization support;
￭ Boot and shutdown speed-up;
￭ New init system;
￭ rpm and yum enhancements;
￭ libata will be used for PATA support;
￭ syslog to be replaced with syslog-ng;
￭ Improved firewire support;
￭ Real-time kernel;
￭ Tickless kernel support;
￭ Fix wakeups across the distribution;
￭ Encrypted file systems.

Let's have a look at the Fedora 7 preliminary schedule:

￭ Fedora 7 Test1: January 30.
￭ Fedora 7 Test2: February 27.
￭ Fedora 7 Test3: March 26.
￭ Fedora 7 Final Release: April 24.

About Fedora:

The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community in order to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule.

Until Fedora 7 is available, you can download Fedora Core 6 now from Softpedia.