Adam Williamson reports that the Fedora project is now producing automated nightly live builds of Rawhide, its development branch - now you can test the freshest Rawhide without having to install it at all.

Please fasten your seat belts, the touch down area is in sight we do have clear view and smooth weather conditions. So we expect a smooth landing for the release of openSUSE 11.3 on July 15, 2010. Let’s polish and fine-tune openSUSE 11.3 now. Get the RC1 from our software portal right now!

The recent problem with prelink in Fedora Rawhide has led some to wonder about what advantages pre-linking actually brings—and whether those advantages outweigh the pain it can cause. Pre-linking can reduce application start up time—and save some memory as well—but there are some downsides; not least the possibility of an unbootable system as some Rawhide users encountered.

Systemd, an alternative to Upstart or System V init, has made big strides since it was announced at the end of April. It has been packaged for Fedora and openSUSE, and for users of Fedora Rawhide, it gets installed as the default. There are still bugs to be shaken out, of course, and that work is proceeding, especially in the context of Rawhide.

Brief description of Xen 3.4.1 and Libvirt 0.7.1 deployment to Fedora 12 Alpha (rawhide) follows bellow. F12 instance was created on the second drive. All my attempts to resize default LVM created by installer caused installer to crash.

Firebird 2.5 rpms are in Fedora rawhide (Fedora 15), on EPEL6 beta for RHEL6 and future Centos6.
For Fedora 14 (the actual stable Fedora) There is a private repository.

Red Hat's community Linux has undergone a major development change, with the bleeding edge Rawhide splitting off to become its own branch. A look at what this means, and why it matters.

Nouveau’s 3D support recently became available in Rawhide / Fedora 13 with an update to the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. I was impressed when it ran Compiz, really impressed when it ran Neverball, but running Spring is nuts.

I wrote a post a few days ago about the bits and pieces of proprietary software that are still a necessary part of my technological life.  As a follow-up, I thought it might be interesting to look at the other side of the coin, by considering how many people would be able to survive without free software.