Fedora Core 6 Preview

Premiering with Fedora Core 5 was Pup and Pirut for updating and installing new RPMs, as a new graphical front-end for yum, and a replacement for up2date in Fedora Core. However, up2date is still suited for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. One of the items missing from Fedora Core 5 was a notification mechanism or applet for alerting users when new RPM updates have hit the installed repositories, however, now in FC6T1 we have the first look at the new Pup applet for notifications.

The Pup applet shows on the desktop when there are new updates in the repository, while hovering the mouse over the applet will yield the amount of packages that need to be updated. Right clicking on the applet will allow you to refresh, apply the updates, or quit. The applet has certainly been handy during our short testing term, and is a feature that we very much look forward to seeing in Fedora Core 6.

Another notable advancement with FC6T1 is the integration of a new printing system -- a new system-config-printer and CUPS v1.2.1. The new system-config-printer interface is very easy to work with. The basic printing server settings include showing printers shared by other systems, share published printers connected to this system, allow remote administration, allow users to cancel any job, and save debugging information for troubleshooting. The new interface is not yet complete, but it is certainly a good insight at what users can expect to see in time for Fedora Core 6.