Pidgin will not be in Fedora 12

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As I was going through the Features of Fedora 12, I was amazed to see this big change. Pidgin will not be default IM client in Fedora 12. Instead Empathy will be set as the default IM client. This means Pidgin fans have to install Pidgin separately. Same is the case with Ubuntu. Even Ubuntu is replacing Pidgin with Empathy. May be the main reason is that, Pidgin does not support Voice and Video chat. But for upgrades (from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12), Pidgin will remain the default. For new installations, Fedora will be using Empathy.
Source article

A detailed list of differences between Emapthy and Pidgin is available in this link: Pidgin vs Empathy

Pidgin was rocking as an instant messenger on my desktop. Never used Empathy, but have to try out and check the features of it. There is some sense in replacing such a good IM client with Empathy by the greats like Fedora and Ubuntu.

May be the reason behind Pidgin being discarded is that it never tried to support voice chat or video chat. So "Keep updated and survive" should be the motto for them.

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Fedora 12 Release name as Constantine.

Fedora 11 is already released and planning for Fedora 12 is also going on. To codename Fedora 12 the red hat community gave a list of option to vote for. The options were

* Chilon
* Constantine
* Orville
* Rugosa
* Umbria

Fedora 11 is called "Leonidas" and has a link with the name of Fedora 10 as "Cambridge". Cambridge and Leonidas were both ships of the United States Navy. In the same way "Leonidas" and "Constantine" are townships in the state of Michigan, USA. It is said that the tradition is of creating linked pairs of codenames.

But the official mailing list of Fedora has a different story to tell.

As defined in the election text, the one (1) candidate with the greatest
number of votes will be chosen as the Fedora 12 Release Name.

So the greatest number of votes were put to Constantine and hence the name was chosen. So from now the Release name of Fedora 12 will be "Constantine"