Fedora 7 around the corner [Update]

The release schedule of Fedora 7 says there are only few days left till Fedora 7 hits the street. Time to recall the most important changes and features.

According to the release schedule Fedora 7 will hit the mirrors at May, 31. And the first results of the most important feature can already be seen at the main servers: the merge of Fedora Core and Fedora Extras make it necessary to restructure the ftp server directory structure, and the new structure was prepared these days.

The second most important feature is about the ability to spin a custom distribution of Fedora 7 as an installable version and/or as a Live CD. Related to that Fedora 7 will come along in several flavours – there will be a typical spin, a server spin and a KDE spin. The idea to have my own version of Fedora 7 is quite appealing 😉

But of course there are other features which made it into the release:

• fast user switching – switch between different desktop sessions of different users without the need to sign out
• libata for PATA – the old ide drivers in the kernel will be removed, the new libata will take over; this might lead to new /dev/ entries (not sure)
• yum/rpm enhancements – several bottlenecks and time consuming bugs were identified and fixed in both yum and RPM
• tickless kernel – the new kernel will be tickless, making it more power friendly and also making it possible to identify power consuming problems and bugs in applications
• wireless firmware – the firmware for wireless cards have been added, including ipwxx
• integration of smolt
• Nouveau drivers – users of Nvidia cards will get the new Nouveau driver (in an Alpha version)

Other features like a new syslog daemon or a new init system were not included. These things might find their way into Fedora 8, however.

Last but not least, you shouldn’t forget that with this version of Fedora you have to be very careful with the update process: don’t use yum! You might end up with a non functional system due to important kernel changes.

Update
red has posted some more details about the current state in a comment to this post. Especially the date isn’t totally fixed yet although everyone works at reaching that goal. Also I forgot to mention the inclusion of the new WLAN subsystem as a big change.