ANKUR JAIN

Long awaited by FC users, Fedora Core 5 has been released. The latest release includes latest Gnome 2.14 and KDE 3.5 versions. XFce 4 has also been bundled alongwith.

Running on the 2.6.15 kernel, Fedora Core 5 disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules.

FC 5 offers the recent releases of other standard softwares like Mono, Java, Firefox and GIMP. It installs GCC 4.1 and tools built with it like Eclipse.

Yes, Mono will be installed by default now. The Gnome Menu is a little streamlined and needs to be adjusted for user-defined behaviour. Mono based applications like Beagle, Tomboy and FSpot have also been offered alongwith the distro.

New look package managers are available by the name of Pirut and Pup, with sleek interfaces, though YUM is being used at the command line. The new look GUI Interface based package managers are not much efficient at packages management.

FC5 is quite sluggish in performance with high system requirements. The release notes for FC5 suggest a minimum of 256 megabytes of RAM for a graphical system, and recommend 512. Even a command-line system requires 128 megabytes.

Screenshots

Mozilla 2.0 Alpha 1 is leaking out as an undeclared Tinderbox Build release available for download from the Mozilla FTP server. Tinderbox builds are released as intermediary versions to the final release, and are often quite similar to the official version release.

Downloaded it and installed this new release; feels a little faster, though most the extensions failed to work with it. Didn’t find much of a difference in this release, except the close tab button available alongwith the tab name.

You can try it here:

Windows EXE - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Windows ZIP - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.zip
Mac - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.mac.dmg
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz