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Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that brings the latest in free and open source software to your desktop, laptop and server, and gives you access to thousands of different open source applications. This helpful, user-friendly operating system is built by people across the globe who work together as a community to create the Fedora Project.

Fedora is free to use, modify, and distribute, and includes software that helps you work, play, organize, and socialize. You can read more information about the Fedora Project on our Overview page.

What's New in Fedora 15?

GNOME 3

  • GNOME 3 desktop environment GNOME 3 is the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available in the Fedora software repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team developers and community volunteers.
  • LibreOffice productivity suite LibreOffice is a community-driven and developed free and open source personal productivity suite which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. It is a fork of OpenOffice.org with a diverse community of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many volunteers. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this release. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream participation and for maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.
  • Firefox 4 web browser A new major version of this popular browser from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release. Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync, native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format, HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface. Thanks to Christopher Aillon from Red Hat and others for integrating Firefox 4 in this release.
  • systemd system and session manager systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements a powerful transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. A related change is /var/run and /var/lock are mounted from tmpfs and results in a simpler, more faster and robust boot-up scheme and aligns to the default configuration of several other distributions. Thanks to Lennart Poettering, Rahul Sundaram. Michal Schmidt, Bill Nottingham and others from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in this release and many Fedora community volunteers for their extensive testing and feedback.
  • Dynamic firewall Dynamic firewall makes it possible to change firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and makes persistent connections possible. This is for example very useful for services, that need to add additional firewall rules including virtualization (libvirtd) and VPN(openvpn). With the static firewall model these rules are lost if the firewall gets modified or restarted. The firewall daemon (firewalld) holds the current configuration internally and is able to modify the firewall without the need to recreate the complete firewall configuration; Since the current implementation is a proof of concept, in this release, it is available in the Fedora software repository but not installed by default. The plan is to make it the default firewall solution in the next release. Thanks to Thomas Woerner from Red Hat for developing this feature.
  • BoxGrinder appliance creator BoxGrinder is a set of free and open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances from simple plain text appliance definition files. Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for upstream participation and bringing this feature into Fedora.
  • Spice integration in Virt Manager With Fedora 15, virt-manager has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops. It is now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, easily taking advantage of all the Spice enhancements directly from virt-manager. Spice provides better performance and additional functionality (such as copy/paste between guest and host) compared to using VNC. Thanks to the spice-gtk library, a new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings. Thanks to Marc-André Lureau, Red Hat developer, for leading development of this feature.

Looking for something else?

Find more spins at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ -- there's a spin for everyone, from education and gaming to science and more!

How to Get Started

Intrigued? Want to give Fedora 15 a try?

You can visit http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora to download a LiveCD, regardless of what operating system you're running. This will give you a working version of Fedora, complete with common applications, all running off your CD drive - your hard drive won't be touched at all. And when you're ready, installation is just a click away.

Want an even more enjoyable way to use Fedora, risk-free? Try the Live USB option. You can use the same download to create a bootable USB stick so you can take Fedora with you anywhere you go. It works great with netbooks without CD drives, too. Check out the instruction page here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB

And if you're running Fedora 14, upgrading is easy. Refer to our handy documentation for help.

Help Make Fedora!

Want to join the Fedora community and help us make the best Linux distribution even better? Get started at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join. Our diverse community from all over the globe welcomes contributors of all types. From artists to marketers to coders to testers to writers to translators and more, you too can get involved. Share what you know or help with something you've always wanted to learn; mentors are always available to help you get started. Any help is appreciated! We'd love to hear your thoughts on Fedora 15. Have a suggestion? Find a bug? Start by taking a look at the Common F15 bugs to see if it's something we know about. (That page has information on what to do if you don't find your bug, too.)

Further reading

Need more information? Check out some of these additional Fedora 15 resources, or talk with a community member in our live chat 24/7.

About this document

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  • Translations of this document are also available - if you make a translation, please link to it from this list!
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