Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Alpha Release Notes

For a previous example of these notes, refer to Releases/9/Alpha/ReleaseNotes. Remove this notice before Alpha release.

What is Fedora?

Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and guided by contributors. These projects are developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards. The center piece of the Fedora project is an operating system that is released twice a year, and is based on the Linux kernel, that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.

To find out more information about Fedora, refer to the following Web pages:

• Fedora Overview
• Fedora FAQ
• Help and Support
• Join Fedora!

Formal Announcement

• https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2008-August/msg000XX.html

What Is The Alpha Release?

The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

You can find the official release announcement here.

How To Try Alpha

Thanks to the infrastructure that was developed during the Fedora 7 release cycle, Alpha is accompanied by live CDs of both the GNOME and KDE desktops, making testing possible without installing any software on an existing system. As the Alpha release is largely targeted at developers and contains many bleeding edge packages, this is the best method for less experienced users who want to get involved with testing.

Alpha images can be downloaded from any of our mirrors. Remember that live images can be used on USB media via the 'livecd-iso-to-disk' utility available in the livecd-tools package on existing Fedora systems. Refer to the USB How-to for more instructions.

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Release Schedule And Feature Details

Development continues on Rawhide during and after the Alpha release, leading up to the Beta and Release Candidate before the final release. The links below provide the release schedule for both the pre-releases and the final release, as well as the wiki pages for the various features planned for inclusion in Fedora 10 where their progress can be tracked.

• Feature List
• Schedule

Providing Feedback

As mentioned above, the Alpha release provides an opportunity for the wider community to begin testing the next release of Fedora. You help the Fedora Project continue to improve Fedora when you file bug reports and enhancement requests. These links explain what needs testing for the Alpha release and allow you to submit your feedback:

• Alpha Testing Details
• Bugzilla Bug Reports

Release Overview

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 10, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress. Also, throughout the release cycle, there are interviews with the developers behind key features giving out the inside story.

1. 1. From here needs to be actual content about the release

System

Boot up

The graphical boot up system that has been used in Fedora 9 and earlier is being replaced with a new system called Plymouth. There are a few issues with it in the alpha:

- The pretty graphical boot splash that comes with Plymouth requires kernel mode setting drivers that
  are not shipped in the alpha.  Until those land, in order to see the graphical plugin you will need
  to add vga=0x318 to the kernel grub command line.  This uses vesafb which won't necessarily give
  you the native resolution for your flat panel and may cause flicker/weird interactions with X.  
  Without vga=0x318, plymouth uses a "text" based plugin that is sort of plain, but functional.
- plymouth hides boot messages.  To get at them you need to press escape or access them from
  /var/log/boot.log after boot up.
- if you mistype your password on your encrypted root filesystem then plymouth will crash quietly
  giving no indication what went wrong.  This is a known issue that is fixed post-alpha.
- plymouth doesn't behave well with fsck and maintenance mode login shells in the alpha. 
- Plymouth has other assorted problems.  It can be disabled by removing rhgb from the kernel command line