These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 15 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release.
The talking points are based in part on the features for this release. Any Fedora community member can introduce a feature, using our feature process.
For desktop users and everyone
Things of general interest to most people using Fedora.
GNOME 3 Feature
GNOME 3 is the next major version of the GNOME desktop. GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with gnome-shell, which is a compositing window manager and desktop shell. It replaces the GNOME 2 desktop shell, which consisted of metacity, gnome-panel, notification-daemon and nautilus. Apart from pure window management, gnome-shell provides the top bar on the screen, which hosts the 'system status' area in the top right, a clock in the center, and a hot corner that switches to the so-called 'overview' mode, which provides easy access to applications and windows.
Additional information is available at the Gnome 3 website.
GNOME 3 is a major rewrite of the GNOME desktop.
LibreOffice Feature
LibreOffice(R) is an office productivity suite that will replace OpenOffice(R). It will be completely open source and driven solely by the community supporting it. It has a word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet creator, database creator, formula editor, and drawing editor.
Additional information is available at the Document Foundation Website.
LibreOffice is the Next generation of Free Office Productivity software.
Power Management Feature
Go Green. Power Management improvements include the PowerTOP tool, which identifies the software components that make your computer use more energy than necessary while idle. Automatic tuning of power consumption and performance helps conserve on laptop battery usage, too!
Additional information is available on the Fedora Power Management SIG wiki page.
Power management features in Fedora 15 generate better efficiency and power usage for both desktops and laptops.
Tryton Feature
Tryton is a three-tier high-level general purpose application platform, providing solutions for accounting, invoicing, sale management, purchase management, analytic accounting, and inventory management.
Further documentation is available on the Tryton Documentation web page.
Tryton provides applications for business management.
For administrators
Improvements that make system administrators' lives better.
Consistent Network Device Naming Feature
Consistent Network Device Naming feature
Servers often have multiple Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX. Ethernet ports embedded on server motherboards will be named em<port_number>, while ports on PCI cards will be named pci<slot_number>p<port_number>, corresponding to the chassis labels. Additionally, if the network device is an SR-IOV Virtual Function or has Network Partitioning (NPAR) capability, the name will have a suffix of _<virtual_function> or _<partition>.
By changing the naming convention, system administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into some "sane" order.
This feature affects all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later (specifically field types 9 and 41). Dell PowerEdge 10G and newer servers (PowerEdge 1950 III family, PowerEdge R710 family, and newer), and HP ProLiant G6 servers and newer are known to expose this information, as do some newer desktop models. Furthermore, most older systems expose some information in the PCI IRQ Routing Table, which will be consulted if information is not provided by SMBIOS.
Additional information is available at the Documentation.
Consistent network device naming based on BIOS-provided port names.
Dynamic Firewall Feature
Fedora 15 adds support for an optional firewall daemon, FirewallD, which provides a dynamic firewall management with a D-Bus interface. Unlike the current firewall model, which requires a complete firewall restart for every change, the firewall daemon manages the firewall dynamically, and can apply changes without restarting the firewall. The daemon can also provide information about the current firewall settings via D-Bus, and accepts changes via D-Bus using PolicyKit.
Additional information about the Dynamic Firewall Feature can be seen on the FirewallD wiki page.
The Dynamic Firewall daemon allows changes to firewall configuration without downtime.
Improved Compression for Live Images Feature
Improved Compression for Live Images feature
Fedora 15's live images are now built using xz, a variant of LZMA, a compression technology. xz typically provides better compression than gzip, but still provides relatively fast uncompression, which makes it suitable for building live images. As a result, Fedora 15's live images are now able to accommodate more data than ever.
To read more about the improved compression technology in Fedora 15 live images, see the feature page for live image compression in Fedora 15.
Improved compression technology allows Fedora to get more data into live images.
systemd System and Session Manager Feature
systemd System and Session Manager feature
systemd System and Session Manager feature description.
systemd is a system and service 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 an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. For more information, watch the available videos.
Additional information is available at the SysVinit to Systemd Cheatsheet.
systemd is the new, cutting-edge system and service manager used in Fedora 15.
For developers
Innovations that make Fedora a great platform for software developers.
BoxGrinder Feature
BoxGrinder is a set of tools for creating appliances -- reconfigured disk images with the operating system and required software ready to run on a selected virtualization platform. BoxGrinder converts simple plain text files into working appliances. Quick and easy to use, it is a great tool for sysadmins and cloud developers to use for creating customized images for various uses. It also delivers the built appliances to a selected location, such as an SFTP server, or Amazon EC2.
Additional information is available on the BoxGrinder Documentation wiki page.
Quick and easy appliance generation for the cloud.
GCC 4.6 Feature
GCC 4.6 has been included in Fedora 15 - and Fedora 15 has been built using it, as well. GCC 4.6 introduces a number of improvements, including a new general optimization level, link-time operation improvements, interprocedural optimization improvements, and compile time and memory usage improvements. It also introduces language-specific improvements for Ada, C, C++, Fortran, and Java (GCJ), as well as now supporting the Go programming language. Additionally, target-specific improvements have been made for architectures including ARM, IA-32/x86-64, MIPS, PowerPC/PowerPC64, S390, and Sparc.
Additional information is available in the GCC 4.6 Release Notes.
GCC 4.6 improves compile time, memory usage, and has a number of improvements for a variety of languages and architectures.
Maven 3 Feature
Maven 3 is a software project management tool for Java-based projects. From a centralized location, builds, reporting, and documentation can all be managed from one tool. Maven 3 aims to ensure backward compatibility with Maven 2, improve usability, increase performance, allow safe embedding, and pave the way to implement many highly demanded features."
Additional information is available at the Maven.apache.org website.
Maven 3 is a powerful software project management tool for Java-based projects.
Python 3.2 Feature
Python 3.2 offers a stability increase to the already solid 3.x line. A number of new enhancements and fixes have been added, including numerous improvements to the unittest module, an extended email package, and improvements to pdb, the Python debugger.
Further information is available in the Python 3.2 Release Notes .
Python 3.2 improves stability with new enhancements and fixes.
Rails 3.0.5 Feature
Rails has been updated in Fedora 15 from 2.3.8 to 3.0.5. Rails 3 includes a number of new features and improvements, including a polished routing AP, and new Action Mailer and Active Record APIs. Additionally, deprecated old APIs have nice warnings, so developers can move their existing applications over to Rails 3 without having to rewrite their code the the latest and greatest practices.
Additional information about Rails 3.0 is available in the Rails 3.0 release notes.
Rails developers will see a number of improvements in the move from Rails 2.x to 3.x.
Spins
Spins are alternate versions of Fedora, tailored for various uses by community members.
Spins are alternate versions of Fedora. In addition to various desktop environments for Fedora, spins are also available as tailored environments for various types of users via hand-picked application sets or customizations.
Interest-specific Spins include the Design Suite Spin, Games Spin, and Security Spin, among others. Available desktop environments, in addition to the GNOME 3 desktop which is shipped in the default version of Fedora 15, include Xfce, Sugar on a Stick, KDE, and LXDE.
To see all of the Official Fedora 15 Release Spins, see the Fedora 15 Release Spins link.
KDE 4.6
KDE 4.6 includes numerous enhancements and new features to the KDE environment. The KDE Plasma workspace has a new Activities system, power management configuration, and improvements in the Kwin window manager. Several applications, including Dolphin, Gwenview, KSnapshot, and KDE Games have received enhancements as well.
Further details on the enhancements in KDE 4.6 can be seen on the KDE announcement page.
The KDE 4.6 spin features enhancements to the KDE plasma workspace and applications.
Sugar 0.92
Sugar 0.92, also known as Sugar on a Stick (SoaS), introduces major usability improvements for the first login screen and control panel, as well as support for 3G networks. This spin enables developers who are interested in working on the Sugar interface to have a platform for development without having an XO laptop.
A list of changes in the 0.92 release is available to read here.
Sugar 0.92 includes a number of enhancements and fixes for the OLPC XO desktop environment.
Xfce 4.8
Xfce 4.8 has a number of improvements and new features. The Xfce menu now supports menu merging, and graphical menu editors such as alacart now work with Xfce. Task list windows can now be filtered by monitor, and multi-monitor support has been improved. PolicyKit support in xfce4-session has been added, and Thunar has been ported from thunar-vfs to gvfs allowing for mounting all kinds of remote shares. Additionally, a number of other bug fixes, memory improvements, and minor enhancements have been made.
A tour is available at the Xfce Tour Website, including Screenshots.
Full changelogs are also available.
A fast, friendly and clean desktop.