F7Test4/ReleaseNotes

= Fedora 7 Test 4 Release Notes =

This document is a highly abridged version of the release notes used during the test phases of Fedora 7 development. The full complement of release notes follow during the test4 phase, according to developer and community participation in the release notes process.

Welcome to Fedora 7 Test 4
Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and guided by the 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 central Fedora project is an operating system and platform based on Linux that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, now and forever.

You can help the Fedora Project community continue to improve Fedora if you file bug reports and enhancement requests. Refer to this page for more information. Thank you for your participation.

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


 * Fedora Overview (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview)


 * Fedora FAQ (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ)


 * Help and Support (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate)


 * Participate in the Fedora Project (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HelpWanted)

Release Notes
The release notes for Fedora 7 Test 4 are located at.

Important Warnings about the Test Release

 * The 2.6.21 kernel uses new IDE drivers which use the same 'libata' subsystem as the SATA drivers. As a side-effect, IDE devices previously named /dev/hdX will now be named /dev/sdX. This may cause problems with anything that mentions devices by name instead of by filesystem label. Anaconda should be able to detect some of these problems and help you fix them.

New in Fedora 7 Test 4
This test release includes significant new versions of many key components and technologies. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora.

Merger of Core and Extras

 * The Fedora Core and Extras software repositories are being merged, resulting in a shared infrastructure and a single repository of packages to which everyone is invited to contribute.


 * In previous test releases the default product was called "Prime", but after feedback from Marketing and the community it has been renamed simply "Fedora".


 * Fedora 7 Test 4's primary product is a Desktop/Development Workstation/Server distribution which closely matches the contents of previous Fedora Core releases.


 * Many more packages are available in the development repositories.


 * Three targetted spins are under discussion: Fedora, Fedora KDE, and Fedora Everything. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureFedoraTargetedSpins for more details.

Live CD

 * This test release includes three Live images: an i386 Desktop Live CD, an x86_64 Desktop Live DVD, and an i386 KDE Live CD. These Live CDs can be installed to disk using the graphical Anaconda installer.

Desktop

 * This test release features GNOME 2.18.0.


 * The new Echo icon theme is no longer the default, although it is still available from the repositories.


 * KDE and Xfce, among several other packages, are included in the development repositories, but not on the media. They can be installed using the appropriate software management tools.


 * Fast User Switching is now available via the fast-user-switch-applet. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureFastUserSwitching for more details.

Performance

 * System performance is generally slower in the test releases as compared to the general release since we enable several options that help with debugging.


 * Yum / rpm performance should be better in this release than previous Fedora 7 test releases.

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Users who upgrade from older releases need to read the  and man pages to learn about the the new syntax for calling, as well as edit the configuration file to follow the new syntax.

Road Map And Release Schedule

 * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/

Intended Audience for Test Releases
Test 4 is for beta users. This is the time when we must have full community participation. Without this participation both hardware and software functionality suffers.

Quality Assurance for Test Releases
The Fedora Project has a process in place for ensuring the highest possible quality even in our test releases. Many bugs are identified, prioritized and fixed during the testing process. We also have a list of known bugs in this release. Refer to this page  for more details.

Tracker Bugs
The Release Engineering and QA teams keep track of bugs that are considered release blockers. You can see that list here: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=FC7Blocker

In addition, a list of non-blocker bugs that should be fixed for Fedora 7 if possible can be found here: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=FC7Target

Please check these lists before reporting new bugs!

Reporting Bugs
Bugs for this release should be reported against the Fedora Core product, version 'devel'. You can use this convenient link to report bugs: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora%20Core&version=devel

Translations of Release Notes
Due to the rapidly changing nature of test releases, translations of release notes for test releases are not practical. The initial goal is to have a translation of the release notes included in the test4 release and to allow community review and correction before the general release. As always, the general release is translated following the established practices for localization  (l10n) and internationalization (i18n), which result in comprehensive, high-quality release notes in a variety of languages.

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