Five Things in Fedora This Week: testing, schedule, diversity, interviews, and Workstation roadmap

Fedora Media Writer Test Day today

Traditionally, the main download from the Get Fedora website has been an ISO — a disk image file which prospective Fedora users then need to figure out how to get onto a CD/DVD or USB stick. These days, many people rarely ever burn CDs (personally, I only have one older laptop which even has a CD/DVD drive), and the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive isn’t always straightforward.

For Fedora 24, for people currently using Microsoft Windows, the primary download will instead be Fedora Media Creator (formerly LiveUSB Creator). Once downloaded, this tool will take care of fetching the actual drive image and writing it to bootable media. We hope this will make it a lot easier for new users to try out (and switch to!) Fedora.

But, in order for this to be successful, we need to make sure the experience is bug free. So, if you have access to a Windows machine, please join us in our Fedora Media Writer Test Day, today (April 19th, 2016).

Fedora 24 (and Fedora 25) schedule update

We’re currently planning on a beta release for Fedora 24 in two weeks, on May 3rd. This is running with a slightly tighter beta timeframe than usual, with the aim of shipping the final release on June 7th. Remember that we always work to balance testing and quality with a predictable schedule. The first part of that means Fedora 24 may very well end up “slipping” another week, but the second means you can still expect Fedora 25 in early November — and then back on track for Fedora 26 in May, 2017.
Even if the exact dates aren’t precise, you can always expect a Fedora release around Mother’s Day and another around Halloween — that is, one in late April or early May, and the other around the end of October or beginning of November. As you can see, we’re a little past that for Fedora 24, but we’re still aiming to keep the annual cadence in sync. That helps upstream software like the GCC compiler suite, glibc (a crucial system library at the heart of every traditional Linux distribution), and GNOME coordinate. It helps developers know when new change or feature submissions should be submitted. And, of course, it’s nice for users to know when the new hotness will appear.

Welcoming our Diversity Advisor

When we created the Fedora Council, we added the role of Diversity Advisor to coordinate and support initiatives for measuring and increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in Fedora. Last month, we were happy to announce that long-time contributor Maria Leandro — known to many of us as “tatica” — will take this seat. Fedora’s mission is to lead the advancement of free and open software and culture, and we want to make sure that that includes and benefits all of humanity.

Fedora Project Leader Interview

Talking about Fedora with the world at large is an important part of my job as Fedora Project Leader. I recently did an interview with Bryan Lunduke over at Network World, and I’m really happy with how this one came out (even if I do say so myself). Check out part one, Getting to know the man leading Fedora and part two, Fedora leader: ‘We want users to control their own computing destiny’.

And, in case you missed it, I also did one with PC World back in February.

What’s next for Fedora Workstation?

On his blog, Fedora Workstation developer Christian Schaller writes about what he calls the “Fedora Workstation Phase 1 Homestretch“. He summarizes some of the technical goals for Fedora on the desktop, gives an overview of our current progress, and sets the stage for where we might go next.

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2 Comments

  1. Leslie Satenstein

    Hi Matthew
    Is there going to be a pre-beta version*

    I’ve been testing with the latest versions posted here at..
    https://www.happyassassin.net/nightlies.html

    • Those nightlies basically are the pre-beta versions. There will also be RCs — release candidates — as we get closer to the release. These will be used in the formal testing. Of course, if you install the Alpha now, and then apply updates, you are effectively getting a “pre-beta”.

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