Fedora 9 lands carrying OpenJDK 6 and more for developers
by Karsten 'quaid' Wade
Dev Fu focuses on the fresh and free OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9 (Sulphur) because this is great news for developers. Especially developers who want to use the best software because it’s free and it doesn’t suck. However, there is much more of interest for developers than just OpenJDK:
- Developers using Fedora as a workstation/laptop to develop on:
- gcc 4.3, perl 5.10
- NetworkManager has had huge improvements, making it one of the best wireless experiences on laptops for any operating system; it now supports a wide range of mobile broadband solutions
- Live USB with persistence means your favorite development environment in your pocket now lets you carry around and update your projects.
- Eclipse that runs well on Linux runs best on Fedora, and subsequently Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Use the Microsoft Windows-based tool livecd-creator to create live instances of Fedora on USB flash media
- KDE 4 and GNOME 2.22 for great desktop environments
- Partition resizing at install time, including NTFS partitions
- Pre Upgrade, to upgrade an older installation directly
- … and OpenJDK 6!
- Developers targeting the environment for applications:
- D-Bus improvements
- More libvirt, the virtualization API
- ext4, begin working now with the next iteration of this stable and standard file system
- XULRunner now the common engine for Gecko using applications
- Common dictionary used across applications fixes proliferation of dictionaries
- freeIPA provides a common account system that can be adopted for an application
- As Java based applications begin to get packages in to Fedora, many should land in Fedora 9. Hear that, JBoss.org fans?
- … and OpenJDK 6!
- Developers managing systems, such as testing and build:
- func, the Fedora Unified Network Controller
- cobbler, rapid provisioning services
- oVirt, the WebUI virtual machine manager, and Virtual Machine Manager, the desktop client
- … and OpenJDK 6!
For a good general overview of Fedora 9, read Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields article in Red Hat Magazine, “Fedora 9: Get yours and get involved“. The full feature list for Fedora 9 is also a good read.
