< PowerPC
This is a draft announcement, edits and additions are welcome. (In particular, within the Power-specific Features, Bugs, and Future Development sections). However, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
We can say with great certainty the Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 20 ("Heisenbug"), which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Fedora Project.
Download this leading-edge, free and open source operating system now:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/20/ppc64/
Detailed information about the Fedora 20 release which Fedora for Power is based on can be seen in the release notes:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Release_Notes/index.html
Supported Hardware
IBM POWER servers are the only systems fully supported by Fedora for Power at this time.
Apple MacPPC systems are not supported, have not been tested, and are not expected to work.
Power-Specific Features
In addition to all of the standard Fedora 20 features, Fedora 20 for Power also has the following changes:
- grub2 has replaced yaboot as the DVD bootloader. yaboot is now completely deprecated.
- All 32-bit packages have been removed from the install media. They are still available online.
Maturity and Advanced Features
Sometimes it's not the big, new features that make a user's experience better; it's the little enhancements or long-awaited tricky features that really help make a new release the bee's knees. Fedora for Power inherits the following enhancements and changes from Fedora 20.
NetworkManager Improvements
NetworkManager is getting several improvements in Fedora 20 that will be welcome additions for power users and system administrators.
Users will now be able to add, edit, delete, activate, and de-activate network connections via the nmcli command line tool, which will make life much easier for non-desktop uses of Fedora.
NetworkManager is also getting support for bonding interfaces and bridging interfaces. Bonding and bridging are used in many enterprise setups and are necessary for virtualization and fail-over scenarios.
No Default Sendmail, Syslog
In the interests of paring down services that are generally not used on desktop systems, Fedora 20 removes and replaces some services that many users find unnecessary from the Live Desktop DVD. They will remain available as installable packages for users who might need them.
The systemd journal now takes the place as the default logging solution for minimal and other selected installation methods, such as the Live Desktop DVD, having been tested and able to manage persistent logging in place of syslog.
Also, Sendmail will no longer be installed by default, as most Fedora installs have no need of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).
Power-specific Bugs
- yelp may segfault. Yelp is run automatically by gnome the first time you login.
- Users with graphics cards powered by the radeon driver may have to install using VNC or text mode.
Fedora Project Documentation and Common Bugs
Read the full release notes for Fedora 20, guides for several languages, and learn about known bugs and how to report new ones:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
- Fedora 20 common bugs are documented at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F20_bugs
This page includes information on several known non-blocker bugs in Fedora 20, please be sure to read it before installing!
Future Fedora for Power Development
Fedora.Next and what it means to secondary architectures
Fedora is currently undergoing a revamp to restructure and redefine how Fedora is produced and consumed. In that context it might make sense to also think about some changes to Secondary Architectures in Fedora, ranging from what products we want to provide with our architectures over how our release cycle and life cycles are to even more radical changes.
We'll kick off a discussion for that on the secondary arch mailinglist in January to see what we'd like to keep and what things we might want to change.
New secondary architecture in planing: ppc64le
One of the
F
s in Fedora stands for First. So when IBM announced they want to invest and support little endian for Linux variants on their Power architecture a few months ago we immediately jumped on the boat and to make sure Fedora would work on that architecture as well.
It's work in progress at the moment and in the early stages but progressing steadily. The folks from IBM are doing the lion share of the work right now with several of the community folks helping out here and there when they encounter oddball cases. Once the whole bootstrap is solid enough we'll start doing the builds on the Fedora side inside koji with proper builders and the whole infrastructure for it.
We expect to have "something" ready for Fedora 21, but it'll likely be more of a tech preview. Interested parties should then be able to download and install it on LE capable hardware to give it a try.
Contributing to The Fedora Project
We hope that you're excited to have Fedora 20 in your hands and are looking forward to using it and exploring its new features and many improvements over Fedora 19. But that's not all! Fedora never stands still, we're always working towards a new and better release and sharing our work with the world. Want to be part of the fun? It's easy to get involved!
There are many ways to contribute to Fedora, even if it's just bug reporting. You can also help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!
Contributing to Fedora for Power
More information on Fedora for Power can be found at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Arch:PPC. To get involved in testing and development of Fedora for Power, join us on IRC in #fedora-ppc on Freenode.