Beta testing of the Fedora Linux 37 distribution has begun. The beta release marked the transition to the final stage of testing, in which only critical bug fixes are allowed. The release is scheduled for October 18th. The release covers Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, and Live builds delivered as spins with KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, and LXQt desktop environments. Assemblies are generated for x86_64, Power64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 37 are:
- Fedora Workstation has been updated to GNOME 43, which is expected to be released on September 21st. With the release of GNOME 43, the configurator has a new panel with device and firmware security options (for example, showing information about UEFI Secure Boot activation, TPM status, Intel BootGuard, and IOMMU security mechanisms). The transition of applications to the use of GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which offers ready-made widgets and objects for building applications that comply with the new GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) recommendations, has continued.
- The ARMv7 architecture, also known as ARM32 or armhfp, has been deprecated. The reasons for ending support for ARMv7 are cited as a general distancing of development for 32-bit systems, as some of Fedora's new security and performance enhancements are only available for 64-bit architectures. ARMv7 was the last fully supported 32-bit architecture in Fedora (repositories for the i686 architecture were discontinued in 2019, leaving only multi-lib repositories for x86_64 environments).
- The files included in the RPM packages are digitally signed, which can be used to check the integrity and protect against file spoofing using the IMA (Integrity Measurement Architecture) kernel subsystem. The addition of signatures resulted in a 1.1% increase in RPM package size and a 0.3% increase in installed system size.
- Support for the Raspberry Pi 4 board is now officially supported, including hardware graphics acceleration support for the V3D GPU.
- Two new official editions are proposed: Fedora CoreOS (an atomically updatable environment for running isolated containers) and Fedora Cloud Base (images for creating virtual machines that run in public and private cloud environments).
- Added policy TEST-FEDORA39 to test the upcoming deprecation of SHA-1 digital signatures. Optionally, the user can disable SHA-1 support using the "update-crypto-policies --set TEST-FEDORA39" command.
- Updated package versions, including Python 3.11, Perl 5.36, LLVM 15, Go 1.19, Erlang 25, Haskell GHC 8.10.7, Boost 1.78, glibc 2.36, binutils 2.38, Node.js 18, RPM 4.18, BIND 9.18, Emacs 28 , Stratis 3.2.0.
- The packages and edition of the LXQt desktop distribution have been updated to LXQt 1.1.
- The openssl1.1 package has been deprecated, which was replaced by the package with the current OpenSSL 3.0 branch.
- The additional language support and localization components have been separated from the main Firefox package into a separate firefox-langpacks package, saving about 50 MB of disk space on systems that do not need to support languages ββother than English. Similarly, auxiliary utilities (envsubst, gettext, gettext.sh, and ngettext) have been split from the gettext package into the gettext-runtime package, reducing the size of the base install by 4.7 MB.
- Maintainers are advised to stop building packages for the i686 architecture if the need for such packages is questionable or results in a noticeable waste of time or resources. The recommendation does not apply to packages used as dependencies in other packages or used in the context of "multilib" to make 32-bit programs run in 64-bit environments. For the i686 architecture, the java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, and java-latest-openjdk packages have been discontinued.
- A preliminary assembly is proposed for testing Anaconda installer control via a web interface, including from a remote system.
- On x86 systems with BIOS, partitioning is enabled by default using GPT instead of MBR.
- The Silverblue and Kinoite editions of Fedora provide the ability to remount the /sysroot partition in read-only mode to protect against accidental changes.
- A variant of Fedora Server has been prepared for download, designed as a virtual machine image optimized for the KVM hypervisor.
Source: opennet.ru