Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat converted its standard Red Hat Linux distribution to the Fedora community-led project in July 2003, choosing to focus its research and development dollars on its enterprise-focused Enterprise Linux distribution.
The company’s engineers remain involved in the Fedora project, however, and future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be based on the Fedora Core distribution. With Fedora Core 1 completed in November 2003, work has already begun on Fedora Core 2, which is scheduled for its first test development freeze on January 23, 2004.
According to the new schedule for the project, it will go through three main test versions before being generally available on April 5. However, the project maintainers have announced that Red Hat considers the inclusion of two technologies essential to Fedora Core 2, and that it will slip the schedule to ensure they are included.
The first of these is version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, which was released by Linux creator Linus Torvalds last week, and the second is SELinux functionality from the National Security Association’s Security-Enhanced Linux project, the latest updated public release of which was made available at the beginning of December.
Other areas of development that Red Hat and the Fedora community will focus on include version 2.6 of the Gnome desktop, version 3.2 of the KDE desktop, Java software projects such as Tomcat, Jakarta and Eclipse, and non-Intel processor architectures, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s AMD64, and possibly also Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
