Announcing CSE Linux Fedora Core 5

Specific Changes:

Here are some of the highlights, and things to watch for, with the new CSE Linux Fedora Core 5 distribution:

GCC:

The new compiler is gcc version 4.1. As usual, be sure to check any existing code to be sure it will compile and run under the new system. You may need to make code modifications. See

       http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html

for details about changes, new features, and fixes in GCC 4.1.

X.org:

X.org X11R7.0 is included in Fedora Core 5. The new modular architecture of R7.0 enables easier driver upgrades and simplifies development. This also introduces several changes that could affect building X based applications. Old code that depends on hard-coded paths may need to be rebuilt. Some specific differences as lifted from the Fedora Core 5 Release Notes:

The entire build system has changed from imake to the GNU autotools collection.
Libraries now install pkgconfig *.pc files, which should always be used by software that depends on these libraries, instead of hard coding paths to them in /usr/X11R6/lib or elsewhere.
Everything is now installed directly into /usr instead of /usr/X11R6. All software that hard codes paths to anything in /usr/X11R6 must now be changed, preferably to dynamically detect the proper location of the object. Developers are strongly advised against hard-coding the new X11R7 default paths.
The imake utility is no longer used to build the X Window System, and is now officially deprecated. X11R7 includes imake, xmkmf, and other build utilities previously supplied by the X Window System. X.Org highly recommends, however, that people migrate from imake to use GNU autotools and pkg-config. Support for imake may be removed in a future X Window System release, so developers are strongly encouraged to transition away from it, and not use it for any new software projects.

DESKTOPS - Removable media:

For desktop users, removable media devices such as cdroms, floppies, and USB devices are no longer added to /etc/fstab and so can no longer be mounted via the mount(8) command (except by the root user). Unprivileged users must now use the

             gnome-mount
             gnome-umount
             gnome-eject

commands to mount, unmount, and eject media. See

             gnome-mount --help

for command line options. Typical commands for mounting, unmounting, and ejecting a CD would be

             gnome-mount -d /dev/cdrom
             gnome-umount -d /dev/cdrom
             gnome-eject -d /dev/cdrom

Determining the device name to use for USB devices could be trickier, but USB devices generally are assigned SCSI naming, such as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc. If the computer's system disk is /dev/hda (IDE), the first USB device would typically be /dev/sda and mounted via

             gnome-mount -d /dev/sda

If the system device is /dev/sda (SCSI or SATA), the USB device might be something like /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd, etc. The 'lshal' command can be used to determine how the system named your connected device, but (warning) it isn't necessarily easy to find your particular device in the output. You can also look through the system log via "dmesg | grep SCSI" to determine the device name assigned.

LinuxThreads:

LinuxThreads support has been removed. As promised, Fedora Core 4 was the last Fedora release to support LinuxThreads. The Native POSIX Threading Library (NPTL), which has been the default threading library for several RedHat/Fedora releases, has now replaced LinuxThreads completely.

Default PDF Viewer:

The default PDF viewer has reverted to gv(1) for CSE Linux machines under Fedora Core 5. We received lots of complaints about evince in FC4, so we intended to drop it from the Lab's standard set of packages, but it remains, by request, in FC5. Adobe's acroread and xpdf also remain available for viewing PDF files, although xpdf may be dropped in a future release.

POSIX 1003.1-2001 in coreutils:

The commands tail(1) and sort(1) are part of the 'coreutils' package. When invoking

             tail +5 file
       and
             sort +2 file

the '+5' and '+2' are now interpreted as file names, rather than arguments to the tail and sort commands. This is required for POSIX 1003.1-2001 conformance. For the old behavior use

             tail -n +5 file
       and
             sort -k +2 file

or set the environment variable _POSIX2_VERSION to 199209. For more information see

             info coreutils "Standards Conformance"

Check your shell scripts to see if they need modification to get the behavior you expect.

Packages:

As with all Linux upgrades, many packages have newer versions. Here are some examples:

Package FC5-ver at beta FC4-ver on 5/23/06

firefox 1.5.0.4 1.0.8

gcc 4.1.1 4.0.2

glibc 2.4 2.3.6

ghostscript 8.15.2 7.07

mysql 5.0.22 4.1.20

perl 5.8.8 5.8.6

php 5.1.4 5.0.5

postgresql 8.1.4 8.0.7

thunderbird 1.5.0.2 1.0.8

xorg-x11 R7.0 R6.8.2

Package	FC5-ver at beta	FC4-ver on 5/23/06
firefox	1.5.0.4	1.0.8
gcc	4.1.1	4.0.2
glibc	2.4	2.3.6
ghostscript	8.15.2	7.07
mysql	5.0.22	4.1.20
perl	5.8.8	5.8.6
php	5.1.4	5.0.5
postgresql	8.1.4	8.0.7
thunderbird	1.5.0.2	1.0.8
xorg-x11	R7.0	R6.8.2


	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to CSE Support]

FC5 Rollout Timeline

Specific Changes: