F11 Beta Announcement

Fedora 11 Beta:

Is a better operating system than Fedora 10 even possible? After all, this is the distro that prompted Linux Format magazine, on the cover of their February issue, to exclaim "Fedora 10 kicks Ubuntu's ass". Well, you are about to find out. The folks at the Fedora Project have made the Beta of Fedora 11 available at:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

They hope to repeat the crazy success of Fedora 10's Beta contest! Test five things in the Beta that are important to you as a user. If you find a bug *and* report it, you get the free attention of a package maintainer on a problem personally important to you!

https://bugzilla.redhat.com

Do your part to make Fedora 11 that much better.

Among the top features of this ground-breaking release:

• Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer - Allows programs on the desktop to automatically install applications, fonts, multimedia codecs and clipart.

• Fingerprint - Better Out-of-the-box experience for systems with fingerprint readers. Support for one more piece of frequently found hardware. Configuration now available through graphical Authentication Configuration.

• Desktop Environments - Updates to Gnome 2.26 and KDE 4.2 incorporate new features for these popular desktops. Xfce and Sugar have also been updated.

• Minimal Platform - Enable small installations for a server or desktop appliance

• Virt Console - In Fedora 10 and earlier the virtual guest console is limited to a screen resolution of 800x600. In Fedora 11 the goal is to have the screen default to at least 1024x768 resolution out of the box. In new installs of F11 there will also be provided the ability to use other interface devices such as a USB tablet. The X server in the guest will automatically detect & configure this. This will result in a mouse pointer which tracks the local client pointer 1-for-1 while providing expanded capabilities.

• Volume Control - The multimedia experience of Fedora users is improved by an easily understandable and much more flexible volume control model.

But wait, there's more! For developers there are all sorts of goodies:

• Windows Cross-compiler - Build and test full-featured Windows programs, from the comfort of the Fedora system, without needing to use Windows.

• Python 2.6 - Include Python 2.6 in Fedora.

• NetBeans 6.5 - NetBeans IDE 6.5 is a significant update of NetBeans IDE 6.1 which ensures that the latest version is available to developers.

• gcc 4.4 - Switch GCC in Fedora 11 to 4.4.x Rebuild all packages with gcc 4.4.x

• Eclipse profiling tools - Add the power of various native profiling tools into the Eclipse IDE and integrate with the rest of the development environment. Specifically add Linux Tools, OProfile, and Valgrind integration.

Peek behind the kimono and there is still more:

• Intel, ATI and Nvidia kernel modesetting - Fedora 10 provided the first steps by a major distribution into using the kernel modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. We indicated at the time that we would be adding greater support for additional video cards as time went on. KMS originally was featured only on some ATI cards. In Fedora 11, this work is extended to include many more video cards, including Intel and Nvidia, and additional ATI as well. Although not fully complete, we have increased enormously the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with more to come.

• Anaconda Storage - New storage code to use udev for detection of block devices and rewritten modules for management of partitions (pyparted), LVM, Software RAID, and block device encryption (pycryptsetup). The rewrite does not change the user interface.

• Control groups - Allows system administrator to partition the system resources into different sub groups, and dedicate these sub groups resources to different applications' need.

• DeviceKit - A simple, modular system service to manage devices and designed to partially replace hal. Users gain a graphical disk management application called palimpsest which integrates nicely into the desktop.

• DNS Security - DNSSEC (DNS SECurity) is mechanism which can prove integrity and authenticity of DNS data.

• ext4 filesystem - Make ext4 the default files system for anaconda-driven installs (replacing ext3). User should notice generally better performance, and benefit from things like persistent preallocation when using updated torrent clients, etc.

• sVirt MAC - sVirt integrates SELinux with the Fedora virtualization stack to allow Mandatory Access Control (MAC) security be applied to guest virtual machines

And that is only the beginning. A more complete list and details of each new cited feature is available:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList

For release information, including common and known bugs, please see our release notes:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/Beta/ReleaseNotes