It most likely won’t be first but the first rippling schedule slip has arrived for Fedora 20 with its alpha release put back by a week to 24 September. Fedora acts as a trailblazer for many of Linux developments and is known for being able to slip past its original schedule with ease thanks to that trailblazing. Right now, two blocker bugs in particular are needing to be fixed to move forward to alpha and the delay means that all the subsequent milestones have moved a week too. The date to watch is the final release date, currently set to 3 December; a couple more slips could put it into the Christmas holiday and then the Fedora devs may well push it into the new year. But for now, there’s an alpha coming.
What’s coming in Fedora 20? ARM becomes a primary architecture alongside x86, there’s a new application installer, NFS will support SELinux labelling and bridging and bonding is due in NetworkManager. There’s also updates for the Bluetooth stack (to Bluez 5), Boost (to 1.54.0), Ruby on Rails (to 4.0) and Perl (to 5.18). Defaults are also changing with no Sendmail or Syslog in the core. Other changes of note include to addition of Apache OpenOffice to Fedora, the latest GNOME 3.10 and KDE 4.11, installer level support for thin provisioning and support for the recent Linux kernel’s ability to cache hard disks with SSDs.
There are plenty of other changes which have been accepted and are listed in the Fedora 20 ChangeSet. You can keep an eye on the bugs which can hold up the alpha release on the Blocker Bugs page. If you’re more of a beta release type, 29 October should be pencilled into your diary for the Fedora 20 Beta.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog