The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc.-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, recently announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 12 includes new features to appeal to desktop users, administrators, developers and open source enthusiasts alike.
"Overall, one of the things that is really important about Fedora 12 over previous releases is that we have stepped back from the platform a bit to look at the overall user experience that people have, and we have spent a good amount of time applying effort to the fit and finish of the distribution to make for a more pleasant experience when people are using it," Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat, tells LinuxLine.
"The fit and finish that we have done extends from everything down to the engineering work that has been done to provide a beautiful boot screen all the way up to the way that icon spacing done is in the interface and we have looked at everything in-between. And while we don't feel like we are finished with that yet, we do feel like Fedora 12 was a real leap ahead in terms of being a very polished, solid distribution that anybody is able to use."
Among key enhancements in Fedora 12 are next-generation Ogg Theora video, virtualization improvements and advancements to NetworkManager. Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, enhancing the quality of free video. Ogg Theora video in Fedora 12 delivers crisp media, enabling users to stream and download high-definition video while using 100% free and open software, codecs and formats. Additionally, improvements to NetworkManager, a network configuration solution, in Fedora 12 make it easier for users to be online using mobile broadband, or configure servers or other special situations. And, in virtualization-related features, Fedora 12 provides better virtual disk performance and storage discovery, hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption, and a modern network booting infrastructure. These new, higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, scalable and easy to manage solutions.
Other features in Fedora 12 are PackageKit command-line and browser plugins; better file compression to save disk space and time; libguestfs, which lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without booting those guests; SystemTap 1.0, with improvements to help developers trace and gather information for writing and debugging programs, as well as integration with the widely-used Eclipse IDE; and NetBeans 6.7.1.
Learn more about all of the features in Fedora 12 here.
Watch the Fedora 12 release video to learn more about new features and the Fedora community.