Fedora 20 delayed for another week due to Anaconda
The general availability of Fedora 20 has slipped another week to December 17, due to a number of blocker bugs remaining unfixed and the lack of a release candidate being available.
Originally meant to be released on November 26, Fedora's 20th release had been pushed back three times prior to this latest delay.
A number of roadblocks still exist and need to be fixed before the Linux distribution will see a general release, with Fedora's installer, Anaconda, being the cause of many of them.
Most of the blocker bugs have patches working their way through Fedora's quality assurance and testing structures.
Fedora is Red Hat Linux's community distribution that targets two releases per year; the last — Fedora 19 "Schrödinger's Cat" — appeared on July 2.
Fedora 20 has been available as a beta release since November 12, and besides bringing updates to GNOME, Bluez, and KDE, it will also see support for ARM as a primary architecture, the ability to configure NetworkManager via the command line, and support for the configuration of thin clients during installation.
I've been using Fedora 20 for a couple of months now, and I have to say that it is one of the most stable beta releases that I've ever used. Usually, there are a number of issues that appear that make one question why they ever moved to a prerelease, and swear never to do so again, but this time has been different.
If you are a user of Fedora 19 and want to take the plunge early, then I can recommend the use of the new Fedora distribution upgrade tool called FedUp. I haven't seen anything catastrophic arise as a result of using FedUp, unlike the earlier PreUpgrade system that turned my old Fedora installation into a steaming pile of unpredictability.
Besides a couple of changes that I am questioning — the NetworkManager docklet removing easy access to control the wired connection, and the iffy nature of the "improved" software installation and upgrade application, I'd still recommend using yum five times out of four for package manipulation — Heisenbug has been rather uneventful.
For more conservative fans of Fedora, only a week remains between you and general release, again.