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Fedora Core 5 is getting closer and closer to its official release date, March 15, and this Monday, the Fedora Project showed the way by announcing its second beta release of the Fedora Core 5.
Fedora is a community-supported Linux distribution. It also serves as the basis for Red Hat Inc.s enterprise Linux distributions.
The new Fedora is available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Its recommended that only battle-tested Linux users try out the beta, because many of its newest parts are expected to be semi-functional at best.
For the 32-bit Intel platform, this edition has been optimized for Pentium 4 CPUs. While it also supports earlier Intel Pentium-class chips and the AMD and VIA variant chips, its no longer optimized for the first Pentium family because “because Pentium-class optimizations actually result in reduced performance for non-Pentium-class processors, and Pentium 4 scheduling is sufficiently different (while making up the bulk of todays processors) to warrant this change,” according to the release notes.
That said, Fedora will run, in full graphical mode, on systems running with a 400 MHz Pentium II and 256MB of RAM.
For those who arent quite so ready to plunge into the cold water of a beta release, the Fedora Project is providing an illustrated tour of the new release.