Fedora 15 Has A Release Schedule, But Will It Be Met?

The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the release schedule for Fedora 15, the next release of this community Red Hat Linux operating system that was recently codenamed Lovelock.

If this Fedora 15 release schedule is met, the official Lovelock release will come on the 10th of May. The alpha release is slated for the first of March and the beta release is penciled in for 5 April. Other important milestones include the feature freeze being on 8 February (and that's also the point at which Fedora 15 will be branched from Rawhide) and the release candidate on 26 April.

Of course, this is just the expected release schedule, which may very well slip judging by past Fedora releases. Fedora 14 was going to ship on time as a new feature based upon their poor track record of sticking to their release schedule due to engineering/technical delays, but that didn't happen. Will Fedora 15 ship on time? We will see. Regardless, Fedora 15 should make it out in May of 2011.

Among the tentative features for this next Fedora Linux release is switching over to SystemD rather than SysVInit (originally an F14 feature, but it looks like with F15 this will be met), a re-design of the SELinux troubleshooting menu, and using LZMA for the Fedora Live images. When it comes to packages for Fedora 15 there should be the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, GNOME 3.0, KDE SC 4.6, Xfce 4.8, X.Org 7.6 + X.Org Server 1.10, and various other renewed packages.

The Fedora 15 release schedule can be found on the Fedora Wiki along with its feature list. Worth noting is that next week Robyn Bergeron, a long-time Fedora marketing person, is beginning work at Red Hat as Fedora's new program manager. Perhaps we will see Fedora 15 ship on time.