Fedora Core 5

Today I finally upgraded my main system to the latest Fedora release, Fedora Core 5, probably the best distribution on the planet at the time of writing. Actually, until now, I was using the development version of FC5 (aka Rawhide), last updated on the 25th of February, so the new features and improvements were well known to me, but the final stable release adds a boost in performance and GUI rersponsiveness, which are considered only as dreams for the Rawhide version.

IMHO, two are the FC5 key features:

The decision to include Mono,
GNOME v2.14

GNOME v2.14 is impressive. It has a bunch of new features and performance improvements. Nautilus is faster than ever, beagle is the main desktop search tool, Yelp has the ability to show and search man and info pages, the default multimedia applications are based on Gstreamer 0.10 and a lot more… Generally, an amazing desktop.

As I have written in previous posts, there is no repository, other that Extras-Development, that is synced with the Rawhide. So, the last 3 months I used to compile all multimedia packages myself. My first spec files were based on the ones from Livna, but I added my own configuration options and optimizations. So, I decided to keep this habit and spend the rest of the day compiling multimedia packages. Some of them are unstable or CVS versions, which do not exist on Livna for obvious reasons. My spec files will be uploaded at some later time on this web site for anybody who is interested.

Well done, Fedora!

Related Articles