Fedora Core 4 Release Notes (updated)

Fedora Extras is part of the larger Fedora Project and is a volunteer-based community effort to create a repository of packages that compliment Fedora Core. The Fedora Extras repository is enabled by default from Fedora Core 4 onwards.

You can lean more about Fedora Extras from:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras

If you would like to install any software available from Fedora extras you can use yum.

yum install <packagename>

Where <packagename> is the name of the package you want to install. For example, if you wanted to install the abiword package, the command yum install abiword automatically installs the package and all dependencies.

The audit daemon, auditd, is now enabled by default. When auditd is running, the kernel directs audit messages to /var/log/audit/audit.log. The location of this file is specified in /etc/auditd.conf.

AVC messages for SELinux are sent using the audit infrastructure. These messages are now in /var/log/audit/audit.log.

When auditd is not running, the kernel passes audit messages to syslog. These logs are typically kept in /var/log/messages and are viewable using dmesg.

Audit extensions are now compiled into PAM. All programs that do grant entry to the system or change user account attributes will generate an audit message.

To enable auditing within the kernel, you must pass the parameter audit=1 to the kernel during boot. Otherwise, you can use this command to enable auditing during run time:

auditctl -e 1

As the next step in removing support for the obsolete LinuxThreads library, code compiled and linked on Fedora Core 4 now automatically uses the NPTL headers and libraries.

In previous releases since Red Hat Linux 9, the default threading was LinuxThreads since the interface is mostly forward compatible. The advantages of the NPTL interface is that the cancellation handling is faster (when -fexception is used, even in C code) and that the additional interfaces are now available without special compiler and linker parameters. In other words, you do not need to use -I/usr/include/nptl and -L/usr/lib{,64}/nptl any longer. Note that lib{,64} is to be interpreted as lib64 on platforms which place DSOs in lib64/ directories, and lib/ otherwise.

In Fedora Core 4 it is still possible to create code using the LinuxThreads definitions. For this the linuxthreads-devel package must be installed and

-I/usr/include/linuxthreads -L/usr/lib{,64}/linuxthreads

must be passed to the compiler.

Previously, you could select the version of glibc and the libpgthread DSH using run time environment variables. You now need to also specify this variable in the environment:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib{,64}/obsolete/linuxthreads

This additional variable is required because the run/time libraries have been moved out of the way. There may be programs that will not work if the program uses an unfortunate DT_RPATH (which overwrites the LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting).

All this makes it more cumbersome to run programs which depend on LinuxThreads. But this is intentional.

In general, conversion to using NPTL has not been an issue.

The database needed by the locate utility is no longer created by default. Enable the database creation by setting DAILY_UPDATE to yes in /etc/updatedb.conf if you want to use locate.

The version of OpenSSH in Fedora Core 4 is based on OpenSSH 3.9 and includes strict permission and ownership checks for the user configuration file ~/.ssh/config. If this file does not have appropriate ownership and permissions, ssh will exit.

Check that ~/.ssh/config is owned by the owner of ~/, and that its permissions are set to mode 600.

ls -l ~/.ssh/config
-rw-------  1 username username 400 May  5 18:44 /home/username/.ssh/config

The directory ~/ is command-line shorthand for the logged in user's home directory, usually /home/username/.

In addition, OpenSSH is no longer configured to request X11 forwarding by default when connecting to servers. To enable X11 forwarding, the -X or -Y option must be specified, or the ForwardX11 option must be enabled in the ~/.ssh/config file.

The behavior of ssh clients that are invoked with the -X option has changed. In OpenSSH 3.8 and later, X11 forwarding is performed in a way that applications run as untrusted clients by default. Previously, X11 forwarding was performed so that applications always ran as trusted clients. Some applications may not function properly when run as untrusted clients. To forward X11 so that applications are run as trusted clients, invoke ssh with the -Y option instead of the -X option, or set ForwardX11Trusted in the ~/.ssh/config file.

Binary compat symlinks for perl-5.8.0, perl-5.8.1, and perl-5.8.2 have been removed. If you have perl modules built with those older versions of perl, you need to rebuild using the perl-5.8.6 contained in Fedora Core 4.

This section highlights changes and additions to the various GUI server and system configuration tools in Fedora Core.

Fedora Core 4 users are advised not to use the Java RPM provided by Sun. It contains Provides that conflict with names used in packages provided as part of Fedora Core 4. Because of this, Sun Java might disappear from an installed system during package upgrade operations.

Fedora Core 4 users should use either the RPM from jpackage.org or manually install the Sun Java tarball into /opt. Sun Java 1.5+ is recommended for stability purposes.

The sqllite database is now used by yum, and makes performance noticeably faster.

The Fedora Extras repository is now enabled by default.

This section highlights various security items from Fedora Core.

Fedora Core 4 has been built using GCC 4.0, which is included with the distribution.

IIIMF is the Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework. In Fedora Core 4 the iiimf package is updated to version 12.2.

The RC5 release of mod_perl 2.0 is now included. The API provided by this release is incompatible with previous 1.99_xx releases. Please refer to the following document for a discussion of how to adapt code to use the new API:

http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/rename.html

Version 5.0 of PHP is now included, which includes a number of changes to the language along with significant performance improvements. Please refer to the PHP documentation for more information on migrating from PHP 4.3 to PHP 5.0:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php

The /usr/bin/php binary is now built using the CLI command-line SAPI, rather than the CGI SAPI. Use /usr/bin/php-cgi for CGI SAPI. The php-cgi also includes FastCGI support.

The following extensions have been added:

The following extensions are now available as optional loadable extensions, rather than being built in to the PHP binaries:

Users new to the X.org X11 implementation should take note of a few differences between it and the XFree86.org X11 implementation which shipped in previous Red Hat and Fedora operating systems. In particular, the names of some files have changed:

X Server Binary:

X Server Configuration File:

X Server Log File:

When configuring or troubleshooting your X server configuration, be sure that you are using the correct files.

There has been some confusion regarding font-related issues under the X Window System in recent versions of Fedora Core (and versions of Red Hat Linux before it.) At the present time, there are two font subsystems, each with different characteristics:

Over time, fontconfig and Xft will replace the core X font subsystem. At the present time, applications using the Qt 3 or GTK 2 toolkits (which would include KDE and GNOME applications) use the fontconfig and Xft font subsystem; almost everything else uses the core X fonts.

In the future, Fedora Core may support only fontconfig/Xft in place of the XFS font server as the default local font access method.

The steps to add new fonts to Fedora Core 4 depend on the fonts subsystem this is going to use the new fonts. For the core X font subsystem:

Adding new fonts to the fontconfig font subsystem is more straightforward; the new font file only needs to be copied into the /usr/share/fonts/ directory (individual users can modify their personal font configuration by copying the font file into the ~/.fonts/ directory).

After the new font has been copied, use fc-cache to update the font information cache:

fc-cache <directory>

(Where <directory> would be either the /usr/share/fonts/ or ~/.fonts/ directories.)

Individual users may also install fonts graphically, by browsing fonts:/// in Nautilus, and dragging the new font files there.

Due to the transition to the new font system based on fontconfig/Xft, GTK+ 1.2 applications are not affected by any changes made via the Font Preferences dialog. For these applications, a font can be configured by adding the following lines to the file ~/.gtkrc.mine:

    
style "user-font" {
fontset = "<font-specification>"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

(Where <font-specification> represents a font specification in the style used by traditional X applications, such as "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*".)