As we had mentioned yesterday, Red Hat has unleashed Fedora Core 5 Test 2 to its bank of mirrors. Among major package updates and overhauls in various areas of the Linux distribution, Anaconda has been revamped. For the uninitiated, Anaconda serves as the installer for Red Hat distributions, and offers text and graphical variants. The Kickstart mode is also available for allowing a configured and unattended installation. Through all of the Fedora, and many of the older Red Hat versions the graphical installer for Anaconda has failed to change much over time, except for of course in this latest release. Jeremy Katz, the project maintainer, has done an exceptional job with Anaconda as its graphical user interface has achieved new heights with the new installation options and overall appearance. Rather than babbling about all of the improvements, below we have posted some pictures from the Fedora Core 5 Test 2 installation process, and will simply cover some of the highlights now. In addition to the improved graphics and new Fedora "freedom" logo, FC5 utilizes the latest ClearLooks engine. One of the installer changes with Core 5 has been an improved disk part utility. Another notable change has been the package selection area where the various programs are separated into six areas -- Applications, Base System, Desktop Environments, Development, Languages, and Servers. The new package selection area is much easier to navigate and select precisely what interests you, although appending an "everything" and "minimal" areas would serve well in some areas. Beyond the Anaconda installer, some of the installation options have been pushed back to configuring upon the initial boot of the system. The new configurable items when booting the installation for the first time is the firewall and SELinux. While we will have much more information on Fedora Core 5 as its March release approaches, below are some pictures from the improved Anaconda installer found in FC5, while on Phoronix we will be publishing our screenshots shortly.