Red Hat boosts OpenGL for Fedora Core 5

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 21 Mar 2006 at 17:38

Red Hat has made version 5 of its development platform Fedora Core available.

As it previously indicated, Fedora Core 5 includes the first implementation of Xen virtualisation technologies, which will later emerge in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. At present this includes the virtualisation platform built from version 3.0 of the Xen development branch and a guest install script for quick setting up of virtual machines.

However, there's more than virtualisation in version five. Other developments hint at what's around the corner for Red Hat desktop.

With the next iterations of OS X and Vista promising sophisticated user interfaces for desktop environments, Fedora Core 5 can boast Accelerated Indirect GLX (AIGLX) support. This is a hardware-accelerated implementation of OpenGL, which means desktop designers can be much more creative.

There is a range of new apps including F-Spot for managing digital photographs, Tomboy for taking notes, support in multimedia applications for Xiph.org codecs and the latest version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 with ODF support.

The motivation to get one of those shiny Intel Macs to boot Linux also gets a slight boost as Fedora Core 5 has support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets.

Laptops also receive consideration with wider hardware support for power-saving sleep and hibernate modes.

All this is locked down with improvements in security: a stack protector to guard against exploits of buffer overflows, adoption of a new standardized reference policy for the SE (Security Enhanced) Linux security framework allowing policies to be set by package and even by site, controls for role-based access, multi-level security and type enforcement. Finally, Linux Unified Key Support provides hard disk encryption.

'Fedora Core 5 is the first distribution I feel truly involved and excited by,' said Thomas Chung, Fedora Community Ambassador, and clearly feeling somewhat paternal over letting Fedora Core 5 out into the big wide world. 'I'm sure I share this feeling with many Fedora contributors who have witnessed the birth from the very beginning. I can almost feel what a expecting father will experience with his first child. Fedora Core 5 is truly a great accomplishment in technology.'

Fedora is available at fedoraproject.org.