Announcing the release of Fedora 21 Beta for the POWER architecture!

[Peter Robinson]

The Fedora 21 beta release for the POWER platform, in Big and Little Endian
flavours, is here, and - as usual - is packed with amazing improvements to
Fedora, as well as fantastic free and open source software, gently harvested
for your enjoyment. No bits were harmed in the making of this beta.

What is the Beta Release?
=========================

The beta release is the last important milestone before the
release of Fedora 21. A Beta release is code-complete and bears a
very strong resemblance to the third and final release. Only
critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates up to the general
release of Fedora 21. The final release of Fedora 21 is
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/Schedule] expected in
early December. Meanwhile, download the beta of Fedora 21 and
help us make it even better:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_file_a_bug_report

Every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for
millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora 21
a rock-solid distribution. We have a culture of coordinating new
features and pushing fixes upstream as much as feasible and your
feedback will help improve not only Fedora but Linux and free
software on the whole.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects

(See the end of this announcement for more information on how to help.)

Fedora 21 Base
--------------

Each of the products will build on the "base" set of packages for
Fedora. For instance, each product will use the same packages for
the kernel, RPM, Yum, systemd, Anaconda, and so forth.

The Base Working Group develops the standard platform for all Fedora
products, which includes the installer, compose tools, and basic
platform for the other products. The Base set of packages is not a full
product intended for use on its own, but to be kept as a small, stable
platform for other products to build on.

Highlights in the Beta Release
==============================

In this section, we'll look at some of the things that are new or
interesting in the Beta release.

A Note on Shellshocked
----------------------

You've probably read all about the "Shellshocked" vulnerability
in GNU Bash, which affected Fedora 19, 20, and 21 Alpha. Rest
assured that Fedora 21 beta has been patched to close this
vulnerability.

Fedora 21 Server
================

The Fedora Server product is a common base platform that is meant to
run featured application stacks, which are produced, tested, and
distributed by the Server Working Group. Want to use Fedora as a Web
server, file server, database server, or platform for an
Infrastructure-as-a-Service? Fedora 21 Server is for you.

Fedora Server Management Features
=================================

The Fedora Server product introduces new Server management
features aimed at making it easier to install discrete
infrastructure services. The Fedora Server will introduce three
new technologies in Fedora to handle this task, rolekit, Cockpit
and OpenLMI.

Rolekit (https://fedorahosted.org/rolekit) is a Role deployment
and management toolkit that provides a consistent interface to
administrators to install and configure all the packages needed
to implement a specific server role. Rolekit is at an early stage
of development in Fedora 21 Beta.

Cockpit (http://cockpit-project.org/) is a user interface for
configuring and monitoring your server or servers. It is
accessible remotely via a web browser.

OpenLMI (http://www.openlmi.org/) is a remote management system
built atop DMTF-CIM. It can be used for scripting management
functions across many machines as well as querying for
capabilities and monitoring for system events.

*** Release Schedule ***

The full release schedule is available on the Fedora wiki. The
current schedule currently calls for the final release to come
out on December 9th:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/Schedule

Dates are subject to change, pending any major bugs or issues
found during the development process.

Issues and Details
-------------------

This is an Beta release. As such, we expect that you may
encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered
during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the
QA mailing list (test at lists.fedoraproject.org) or in
#fedora-qa on freenode.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read "How to file a bug
report:"

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_file_a_bug_report

Thanks much to all the contributors who've helped bring Fedora 21
this far! We're very excited about this release, and we hope that
you'll enjoy it too.