There’s a lot in Fedora 10 but from my perspective here are the important new features :

• X-server startup and restart improvement
• Open Office 3.0
• Glitch free audio
• Improved Printing

Press release. Get the bits here (live from around 10am ET).

Originally uploaded by sharps

With a bit of trimming, a swap-file and a new build – I now have Fedora 10 running pretty reliably on the OLPC. I wouldn’t call it snappy exactly but it’s a start.

Fedora is running off a writeable live image (using a 4Gb SD Card) which also hosts the swap-file. The poor little XO only has 256Mb RAM and is very low powered so having Firefox eat up 40Mb is a problem – might have to find a replacement

I just signed up for the performance testing team as part of the Fedora on OLPC test effort. Now things are up and running reliably it will be interesting to see what tweaks can be made to improve the performance.

If you’re not already too late – there’s a chance to get your hands on a (mostly) free OLPC if you’re willing to commit to some testing of Fedora on the OLPC. I’ve signed up but fully expect my 7 year old daughter to be doing the testing

The mostly free bit is that you have to provide your own 2 or 4 Gb SD card – if you don’t already have one lying around.

Sign up on the Fedora wiki.

“I wouldn’t be the first to argue that Sun missed the boat by not releasing Java under an open source license sooner. As Apache Project co-founder Brian Behlendorf said in 2006, “I think had they done it, they would have established Java further as the language of choice by so many more people.”

From my very, very minor involvement with the IcedTea project and since joining Red Hat just a few months ago I’ve seen a very different attitude towards Java. I was previously of the opinion (bear in mind I worked for Sun for almost 9 years) that Java was already essentially free and open enough – and that actually making it Open Source wouldn’t really change anything. Java had already become incredibly popular without the advantages of Open Source. But I now think Java did miss a huge opportunity by not being part of the major upstream Linux ecosystems – such Fedora and Debian.

So it almost certainly would have made a big difference 3 or 4 years ago; the question is – will it make a difference now. I’m optimistic – but admittedly slightly biased having invested a large part of the last decade in promoting Java in one way or another. Here’s why I’m optimistic.

1. Java is still young – I still talk to customers who are only just contemplating moving to Java; and I’m still pretty confident that the majority of Java developers are only now working their way through school and college.
2. The only real, mainstream alternative to Java is Microsoft’s .NET platform. And the future of that is somewhat predicated on the success of Vista and Vista isn’t looking too hot right now. OK, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Python all have their place – but  they are just languages and don’t really complete with the Java platform.
3. There’s a real opportunity for one of the Linux distros. to become *the* Java developer OS – right now I would guesss that Windows XP and OS/X account for most Java developers desktops – that just seems completely wrong to me given Microsoft’s and Apple’s disdain of Java.

I feel pretty encouraged by the reaction to our announcement last week and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next wave of innovation in Java came from the new communities who can now adopt it. I for one would love to see one of the major Linux distros like Fedora step up and become the developer OS for Java – and when I say Java; I don’t just mean the language – I mean the entire Java ecosystem.

A couple of things stand out. First – the Fedora peeps took a little bit of a risk by including Firefox 3 (beta 5) but I think it paid off – Beta 5 seems pretty solid and Firefox just keeps getting better and better. There’s no specific feature of Firefox 3 I’m excited about but there a quite a few nice little touches that make a difference – eg. the ability to open all the bookmarks in a folder  – I can now open all my work related apps with one key click – nice.

The second thing of interest is the inclusion of IcedTea – this is a completely free and open version of Sun’s OpenJDK and was developed by Red Hat. I’m personally pretty excited about Red Hat’s involvement in OpenJDK – I think we’ll see Linux in general become a much more important place for the Java platform now that it’s part of the ecosystem.