The Fedora team is please to announce the second test release for Fedora 7. Download links within.

Eric S. Raymond has sent the following out to several Linux publications, along with the Fedora mailing list. "After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."

Read more to see the letter in it's entirety.

Fedora 7 Test 1 has been released today. For this particular release, we only did a Desktop spin of the package collection. We are still fine tuning targetted spins of the collection as part of the merger of Core and Extras. We also produced a LiveCD that has the ability to install to your harddrive, should you wish.

Smolt is a hardware profiler for Fedora so we can get a better idea of what type of hardware is out there in the Fedora universe. It's still in beta but those of you running FC6 or newer (rawhide) can participate.

The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora Core 6. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora Core 6 and all updates released as of January 11th, 2007. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Thursday, January 18th, 2007. PPC images will follow within the next 5 days, but will have had only limited testing.

Max Spevack has announced Red Hat has hired Mike McGrath to be the Fedora Infrastructure Leader.

Effective immediately XaraLX has been removed from Fedora Extras for all releases for violation of Fedora Policies. While the application has been released as GPL, it contains a Static Library that is still proprietary and available in binary form only.

In case any of you are not aware, the Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down.

The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained.