In the world of open source, it seems there are periods of inching forward punctuated by large jumps. I believe we are in the middle of one of those jumps now. In this post I argue that the combination of Fedora Core 3, AMD64, the emergence of Firefox, Java 5 64 bit makes for one of those jumps.
Fedora Core 3 x86_64
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I have been a RedHat devotee for the last 5 years. Their decision to split the open source and commercial distros did not overly concern me. This technique was pioneered by the Mozilla project and has been used by many successful projects including Apple’s Darwin.
When Fedora Core 2 came out I was quite disappointed. While it added the 2.6 kernel it’s quality was much lower than FC1. There were freezing problems caused by power management that required boot-time options to workaround. It seems to me that the distribution’s job is to shield users from these sorts of issues. If a user wants to use the vanilla kernel, they can download and compile it themselves.
With Fedora Core 3, the Fedora project has regained my confidence. It is fast, stable, slick, smooth and mature. I have been using it for the past week as both a user and as a developer, writing Java and C code. With Gnome 2.8 the user interface has many subtle user interface improvements. Desktop integration between the standard apps is improved. For example clicking on a mailto: link in Firefox smoothly opens a send new message dialog in Evolution 2.
I am running the x86_64 version of Fedora Core 3. It comes with 32 and 64 bit versions of libraries, and from what I can tell works well with both. I am using IntelliJ running a 32 bit version of JDK1.4.2. Our code is running JDK1.5.0 64 bit. I can step through my running app in 64 bit Java with my 32 bit Java IDE.
For many people Fedora Core 3 brings them up to date with a year of progress in Linux. There has never been a better time to take the plunge.
AMD64
