January 15th, 2013For desktop users:
· Gnome 3.6 The newest version of the Gnome desktop provides an enhanced Messaging Tray, support for Microsoft Exchange and Skydrive, and many more new features. For more information visit the Gnome release notes. http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.6
· KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 KDE Plasma Workspaces has been updated with many new features and improved stability and performance, including updates to the Dolphin File Manager, Konsole, and KWin Window manager.
· MATE Desktop The MATE desktop provides users with a classic GNOME 2.x style user interface. This desktop is perfect for users that have been running Gnome Classic, or other window managers like XFCE.
· Cinnamon Fedora users now have the option of using Cinnamon, an advanced desktop environment based on GNOME3. Cinnamon takes advantage of advanced features provided by the GNOME backend while providing users with a more traditional desktop experience.
· Improved storage management SSM (System Storage Manager) is an easy to use command-line interface tool that presents a unified view of storage management tools. Devices, storage pools, volumes, and snapshots can now be managed with one tool, with the same syntax for managing all of your storage. (It's great for systems administrators, too!)
For developers:
· Fresh versions of programming languages Using Perl, Rails, or Python? All three of these languages are updated in Fedora 18 -- with Rails 3.2, Python 3.3, and Perl 5.16 now on deck.
· Clojure Clojure gets more love with the addition of tooling packages, including the Leinengen build tool, as well as Clojure libraries and frameworks, including Korma and Noir.
· DragonEgg optimizes GCC DragonEgg is a plugin for the GCC compilers to allow use of the LLVM optimization and code generation framework. DragonEgg provides software developers with more optimization and code generation options for use with the GCC compilers. DragonEgg also allows GCC to be used for cross-compilation to target architectures supported by LLVM without requiring any special cross-compilation compiler packages.
For system administrators:
· Offline System Updates Systems can now be upgraded offline, allowing for a more stable upgrade of critical system components.
· Storage enhancements StorageManagement is a collection of tools and libraries for managing storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).
· Samba 4 This popular suite of tools has long provided file and print sharing services in heterogeneous operating system environments. The long-awaited Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols, and includes a new scripting interface, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals.
· Riak A fault-tolerant key-value store, Riak provides easy operations, and predictable scaling as a NoSQL database.
For clouds and virtualization:
· Eucalyptus Eucalyptus makes its first appearance in Fedora, with their 3.2 release included in F18. This platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure as a Service clouds uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network and storage.
· OpenStack With the Folsom release in Fedora 18, OpenStack continues to have the newest releases in Fedora. This open source cloud computing platform enables users to deploy their own cloud infrastructure, for private or public cloud deployments. Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is also available in F18, providing an API that enables the orchestration of cloud applications using file or web based templates.
· oVirt Engine The management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, oVirt Engine, is updated to the newest version, 3.1. This release includes extensive new features, including support for live snapshots, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, quotas, and more.
· Suspend and resume support for virt guests Virtual machines get love with this feature, enabling the ability to suspend and resume guests, with the close of a laptop lid or menu option - or via the command line.
January 15th, 2013For desktop users:
· Gnome 3.6 The newest version of the Gnome desktop provides an enhanced Messaging Tray, support for Microsoft Exchange and Skydrive, and many more new features. For more information visit the Gnome release notes. http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.6
· KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 KDE Plasma Workspaces has been updated with many new features and improved stability and performance, including updates to the Dolphin File Manager, Konsole, and KWin Window manager.
· MATE Desktop The MATE desktop provides users with a classic GNOME 2.x style user interface. This desktop is perfect for users that have been running Gnome Classic, or other window managers like XFCE.
· Cinnamon Fedora users now have the option of using Cinnamon, an advanced desktop environment based on GNOME3. Cinnamon takes advantage of advanced features provided by the GNOME backend while providing users with a more traditional desktop experience.
· Improved storage management SSM (System Storage Manager) is an easy to use command-line interface tool that presents a unified view of storage management tools. Devices, storage pools, volumes, and snapshots can now be managed with one tool, with the same syntax for managing all of your storage. (It's great for systems administrators, too!)
For developers:
· Fresh versions of programming languages Using Perl, Rails, or Python? All three of these languages are updated in Fedora 18 -- with Rails 3.2, Python 3.3, and Perl 5.16 now on deck.
· Clojure Clojure gets more love with the addition of tooling packages, including the Leinengen build tool, as well as Clojure libraries and frameworks, including Korma and Noir.
· DragonEgg optimizes GCC DragonEgg is a plugin for the GCC compilers to allow use of the LLVM optimization and code generation framework. DragonEgg provides software developers with more optimization and code generation options for use with the GCC compilers. DragonEgg also allows GCC to be used for cross-compilation to target architectures supported by LLVM without requiring any special cross-compilation compiler packages.
For system administrators:
· Offline System Updates Systems can now be upgraded offline, allowing for a more stable upgrade of critical system components.
· Storage enhancements StorageManagement is a collection of tools and libraries for managing storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).
· Samba 4 This popular suite of tools has long provided file and print sharing services in heterogeneous operating system environments. The long-awaited Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols, and includes a new scripting interface, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals.
· Riak A fault-tolerant key-value store, Riak provides easy operations, and predictable scaling as a NoSQL database.
For clouds and virtualization:
· Eucalyptus Eucalyptus makes its first appearance in Fedora, with their 3.2 release included in F18. This platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure as a Service clouds uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network and storage.
· OpenStack With the Folsom release in Fedora 18, OpenStack continues to have the newest releases in Fedora. This open source cloud computing platform enables users to deploy their own cloud infrastructure, for private or public cloud deployments. Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is also available in F18, providing an API that enables the orchestration of cloud applications using file or web based templates.
· oVirt Engine The management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, oVirt Engine, is updated to the newest version, 3.1. This release includes extensive new features, including support for live snapshots, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, quotas, and more.
· Suspend and resume support for virt guests Virtual machines get love with this feature, enabling the ability to suspend and resume guests, with the close of a laptop lid or menu option - or via the command line.
November 8th, 2011· For desktop users: a journey to the center of the desktop...
GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment, brings new features, including:
· System Settings gains an "Online Accounts" panel, which provides a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.
· A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy, Evolution and the new "Online Accounts" settings panel
· A new document management application provides a simpler alternative to traditional file management for both local and "in-cloud" documents.
KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop environment, brings substantial updates, including:
· DigiKam 2.0 adds face detection and recognition, geotagging and more.
· An updated Plasma Workspaces window manager (KWin) makes KDE better suited for mobile devices, and also adds improvements for desktop users.
· A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating systems to select the OS to boot next.
· For developers: Twenty thousand lines in C...
· Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including Unicode 6.0 support.
· GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing with the C internals of GCC.
· D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.
· For system administrators: around the world in eighty columns...
· GRUB2: This leap forward allows better configuration options and better support for non-x86 architectures.
· New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000, providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.
· Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.
· ext4 driver mounts ext2 and ext3: Fedora 16 uses the ext4 driver to mount ext2 and ext3 file systems, reducing the size of the kernel code.
Improved virtualization tools:
· Fedora 16 provides improvements to virtual networking, making large deployments easier.
· Virt-manager guest inspection is a unique-to-Fedora tool allowing read-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry.
· Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.
Cloud goodies galore:
· Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.
· OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
· Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high availability for cloud environments.
· HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.
November 2nd, 2010For desktop users:
A universe of new features for end users:
· libjpeg-turbo: Users can load and save images faster in Fedora 14 than in previous releases.
· Spice: Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) provides users with an enhanced remote desktop experience. Currently, it provides the rudimentary foundation to take advantage of things like Accelerated 2D graphics, encryption, and hardware cursor support.
For developers:
For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:
· D: Fedora 14 introduces support for D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.
· Python 2 upgrade: The system python 2 stack has been upgraded to 2.7.
· GNUStep: A GUI framework based of the Objective-C programming language which is part of the gcc.
· Memory Debugging Tools: The new "gdb-heap" package adds a new "heap" command to /usr/bin/gdb which allows you to get a breakdown of how a process is using dynamic memory.
· Rakudo Star: An implementation of Perl version 6, based on the Parrot VM.
· Support for Milkymist: Developers can enjoy developing for Milkymist, an open hardware embedded board, on Fedora 14. Thanks to the Fedora Electronic Lab for their work in this regard.
For system administrators:
And don't think we forgot about the system administrators:
· Fedora is now available for users of the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud service, released concurrently with the traditional release.
· virt-v2v assists in the easy migration of Xen virtual machines to KVM virtual machines.
· A Virtualization Technology Preview Repo allows users to test the very latest developments in virtualization related packages.
· Varnish has been updated and includes improved scalability and a new log function.
· Apache has been updated and includes a number of module and security fixes.
June 9th, 2009· 20-second boot time - from the moment you turn on the computer to the login screen; shutdown times were also reduced;
· Default EXT4 install - the Fedora team took quite a bold step as the installation now defaults to this powerful new filesystem; experimental Btrfs support is also available;
· New artwork - beautifully designed from boot to the desktop: birds, wavy ribbons and dark blues are part of the new theme;
· KDE 4.2 - the latest and greatest K Desktop Environment with all its eye-candy included
· GNOME 2.26.1 - though there are no major changes, users will notice Brasero as the default CD/DVD burning tool, some minor interface tweaks, improved filesharing, better Microsoft Outlook support in Evolution and more;
· Xfce 4.6 - many new features make the lightweight desktop environment much more efficient and production-ready;
· Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer - enabling third-party programs automatically install required fonts, codecs or clipart;
· Fingerprint reading - devices that provide this feature are supported in Fedora 11 out of the box and configuring them can be easily done through the Authentication Configuration utility;
· ABRT - the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool is a very easy way to report bugs;
· Nouveau - the open source Nvidia driver is now enabled by default;
· Presto - updating the system will be much quicker as this yum plugin brings support for deltarpms, ensuring that only changed components are dowloaded, not the whole packages;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta - a plethora of enhancements to the most popular open source browser makes this a great choice;
· Thunderbird 3 Beta - a great email client with improved performance and better IMAP support;
· Xserver 1.6 - bringing improved performance and stability;
· MiniGW - Windows cross-compiling has never been easier;
· TigerVNC - now the default VNC client;
· GCC 4.4, NetBeans 6.5, Python 2.6 and Git 1.6.2 are sure to increase developing productivity;
· OpenChange - out of the box Microsoft Exchange access;
· Improved Volume Control, now more user-friendly with per-application control and better handling of multiple speaker sets;
· DeviceKit system service, providing better ways to monitor disks through the Palimpsest utility;
September 30th, 2008· Fedora 10 Beta: Cambridge's foundations are laid. Just on the heels of the Fedora project's fifth anniversary, the beta of Fedora Linux version 10 (code-named Cambridge) is now available. Among the new, fun, and interesting features: new NetworkManager with connection sharing; improved printer handling; Sectool, an auditing and security testing framework; RPM 4.6, the first big RPM change in several years; new version of PackageKit for managing software, with more fixes and enhancements; new version of PulseAudio; kernel 2.6.27, including better support for WiFi; new icon theme 'Echo', to be completed with the theme graphic 'Solar' in the Fedora 10 release; GNOME 2.24; KDE 4.1; automatic installation of multimedia codecs....
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