Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on.  This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week.  It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each.  Here are the five things for November 5th, 2014:

How to get the Fedora 21 beta

The Fedora 21 Beta went live yesterday, and you can get it from the prerelease download page at http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease.  This includes all the new Fedora.next variants, ARM images, and Spins, like the KDE and Xfce desktops. 

You can also grab Live images and the Fedora Server installer via BitTorrent.  Either way, while you’re waiting for it to download, read the release announcement and peruse known issues. 

Upgrading to F21 with FedUp

FedUp — the Fedora Upgrader — is our recommended tool to go (relatively seamlessly) from one release to the next.  Due to a late-discovered issue, this isn’t currently available for the beta.  See this bit on the Common Bugs page for details.  We will be producing test

upgrade.img

files as part of the lead-up to F21 final, and would appreciate testing of those when they’re ready. 

Fedora Cloud

The Fedora Cloud release for F21 comes in two sub-variants of its own.  The first is the Fedora Cloud Base Image, which you can download for use in OpenStack or launch directly in Amazon EC2.  This is our more traditional choice — a minimal selection of RPMs plus cloud-init for boot-time configuration. 

We also have Fedora Atomic, an image built around the Project Atomic design patterns. ( Flashback to Colin Walters’ talk at Fedora Day at DevConf.cz last February, which kind of kicked this all off.)  Atomic upstream is moving really fast, and for this reason, Fedora Atomic is kind of a preview in Fedora 21, and actually some of the things we want in for the final release, like the Kubernetes orchestration engine, weren’t quite ready for the beta cutoff.  So, the Cloud Working Group is planning to have some post-beta, pre-final test images in the next week or so to give a better look at what Fedora Atomic will look like — stay tuned! 

Fedora Server

Fedora Server is all about providing easy-to-deploy application stacks which run on a common base.  This is done through a service called RoleKit, and a command-line tool

rolectl

plus an API which you can integrate with your configuration management tools.  For more on this, see our coverage of Stephen Gallagher’s Flock presentation, or install the beta and go right to setting up a Domain Controller in just a few lines. 

Fedora Workstation

And finally, Fedora Workstation is our desktop / laptop system targeted at software developers — not just those of us working on Fedora, but everyone out there building applications and services.  One key feature is DevAssistant, a tool for easy setup and management of project environments.  Like much of Fedora 21, this is under heavy development, and we’d love your input on making this more useful for your daily work. 

F21 Workstation also features a preview of next-generation graphics stack Wayland.  This does not sound particularly developer-focused at first glance, but is actually really important for features software developers have told us matter to them, like better multi-monitor support.  As we continue with Fedora.next, expect to see a lot of other fundamental improvements like this, based on needs gathered from feedback we receive.