As some of you are aware the next development cycle of the best Linux distribution for programming is about to be kicked off.

The guts of it is already done. A long overdue update to perl 5.12 and python 2.7 is included . There’s still quite some testing to do to make sure the upgrade procedure is stable.

The kernel has been updated to 2.6.35 and Xorg 1.9x Initial test on intel and nvidia hardware look promising. As always we’re short on ATI hardware. So if you can spare some time drop by in the IRC channel and ask how to test.

A big chunk of work is left in upgrading from rpm4 to rpm5. Once this is done we’ll start pushing out nightly iso images again. The next stage is then to overhaul the installer, replace yaird with dracut and then provide a boot image which is suitable for booting from USB as well as from CD. From there it’s then only a minor step in also providing a XEN client image. This website already runs on a Yoper Xen Client so this is just a minor step.

But were the fun really is for me this year is in the contributor interface. It’s early days still, but I was able to build in features in an afternoon that were simply out of reach with PHP . With a few more weeks of rails experience under the belt I want to implement ACLs now, which is required to add the features I really like to see in there. But that’s to be written in another post.