Fedora 29 new features: Startis now officially in Fedora

Fedora 29 is the newest release of 2018 of the popular power user distribution: Fedora. Fedora is the base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it is favored among developers. Let’s discover what will change in this release.

When will it be released?

Fedora 29 is scheduled to be released on 30th October 2018.

How do I install Fedora 29?

You can find a step-by-step tutorial here.

System-wide changes

• Atomic Workstation is now Fedora Silverblue. With the recent CoreOS acquisition, the Atomic project is being merged and Atomic Workstation is now known as Silverblue.
• Modules for everyone: modularity is being extended to every edition of Fedora rather than just Server.
• No PPC64 variant: this architecture has been discontinued, the little-endian variant (ppc64le) will still be supported.
• CJK Default Fonts To Noto: Noto is now the default font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
• FedoraScientific VagrantBox: currently Fedora Scientific is packaged as ISO only, providing a Vagrant box will enable users to try out this spin with ease.
• Hidden GRUB menu: GRUB menu won’t be shown on system where only one operating system is installed.
• Better os-release: spins, labs and containers will now use VARIANT and VARIANT_ID in /etc/os-release rather than generic Fedora versions.
• NSS load p11-kit modules by default: “When NSS database is created, PKCS#11 modules configured in the system’s p11-kit will be automatically registered and visible to NSS applications.”
• tzdata vanguard format: “As of tzdata-2018e, the upstream will now default to using the ‘vanguard’ data format including negative DST offsets. As a fall-back, the ‘rearguard’ data format is still available on F28, F27 and F26.”
• i686 builds now include SSE2 support by default.
• ZRAM support for ARM images: “Enable ZRAM for swap on ARMv7 and aarch64 pre generated images to improve performance and reliability on ARM Single Board Computers such a the Raspberry Pi.”

Self-contained

• Stratis Storage 1.0: after Red Hat decided to deprecate BTRFS, Stratis was pushed as the new ZFS-like solution. Stratis has now reached version 1.0 and it will be included in Fedora 29.
• MySQL updated to version 8.0. (Read more about MySQL 8 new features here.)
• OpenShift Origin updated to version 3.10. (Read more about OpenShift here.)
• Kubernetes modules: modules (see modularity) will be created for every version. (Read more about Kubernetes here.)
• Basic FPGA support: A number of devices like Xilinx ZYNQ based devices such as the 96boards Ultra96 and the Intel based UP² have onboard FPGAs. FPGA manager is a vendor-neutral framework that has been upstream in the kernel since 4.4. This is the initial support for FPGAs in Fedora using open source vendor agnostic tools. (This one may not make it in time for the official release).
• OpenLDAP to drop support for MozNSS.
• No more automagic Python bytecompilation: “The current way of automatic Python byte-compiling of files outside Python-specific directories is too magical and error-prone. It is built on heuristics that are increasingly wrong. We will provide a way to opt-out of it and adjust the guidelines to prefer explicit bytecompilation of such files. Later, the old behavior will be opt-in only or will cease to exist.”
• User PATH Prioritization: “Changing user PATH ~/.local/bin and ~/bin to be moved to the top of the PATH list instead of the end. This will bring Fedora in sync with other distributions which already fixed this issues (Debian/Ubuntu) and will make it easier for users to install and use their own command line tools, also fixing multiple bugs where user installed tools cannot be accessed because the system installed ones took precedence.”

Developers

• GlibC updated to 2.29.
• Binutils updated to 2.31.
• Python 3.x updated to 3.7.
• Node.js 10.x is now the default Node.js interpreter.
• Ruby on rails updated to 5.2.
• Golang updated to 1.11.
• Perl updated to 5.28.
• /usr/bin/python will have its own package: “Reflecting the recent changes of PEP 394 — The “python” Command on Unix-Like Systems, we are moving /usr/bin/python from the python2 package into a separate package called python-unversioned-command. python2 will recommend this package.”
• Perl Move to MetaCPAN: “search.cpan.org web frontend for CPAN is being replaced by metacpan.org. Many Perl RPM packages refer to search.cpan.org. This Fedora change aims to mass-update URL and Source RPM tags in affected Perl packages.”

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The IT guy with a slight look of boredom in his eyes. Freelancer. Current interests: Kubernetes, Tensorflow, shiny new things.

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