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Linux
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Written by Dan Bishop
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Friday, 01 June 2007 10:11 |
The latest version of Fedora is finally ready. Red Hat has also has opened all the Fedora operating system packages to the community. Previously, Fedora Core packages were maintained only by Red Hat employees. The company says removing these barriers gives the Fedora community more influence over the development of the operating system.Initial impressions are good, lots of eye-candy and a new slogan: "Reach Higher." So what else is new? Firstly, Fedora includes several different "spins", which are variations of Fedora built from a specific set of software packages. Each spin has a combination of software to meet the requirements of a specific kind of end user. In addition to a very small boot.iso image for network installation, users have the following spin choices: - GNOME and KDE desktop environment based bootable Live images that can be installed to a hard disk. These spins are meant for desktop users who prefer a single disk installation and for sharing Fedora with friends, family, and event attendees.
- A regular image for desktops, workstations, and server users. This spin provides a good upgrade path and similar environment for users of previous releases of Fedora.
- A set of DVD images that includes all software available in the Fedora repository. This spin is intended for distribution to users who do not have broadband Internet access and prefer to have software available on disc.
As you would expect there is also lots of updated software compared to the previous release: This release features GNOME 2.18 and KDE 3.5.6- Fast user switching is well integrated in this release. Developers have enabled this feature through extensive development work on ConsoleKit and full integration throughout the distribution.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/FastUserSwitching - Display devices can be hot plugged and work automatically, thanks to the inclusion of Xorg Server 1.3.
- This release provides a number of firmware packages for enhanced wireless networking. NetworkManager presents a graphical interface that allows user to quickly switch between wireless and wired networks for increased mobility. NetworkManager is installed by default in both GNOME and KDE Live CDs.
- I18N support is much improved by the presence of SCIM input methods, which now work automatically after installation without any configuration. SCIM can handle nearly every alphabet/set of characters in use. Fedora is now more accessible to a wider audience by the default inclusion of a number of language packages and input methods in the GNOME based Live CD.
- Fedora now integrates the experimental nouveau driver within Xorg and the kernel. The nouveau driver, which is disabled by default in this release, aims to provide free and open source 3D drivers for nVidia cards. End users are asked to provide feedback on this feature to the project developers, to further the goal of having fully functional 3D drivers by default.
That last point is one of particular interest, I know of no other distro that has tried to make use of nouveau yet. All in all, there are a lot of nice features and it does feel well polished, but somehow it's not quite a Feisty Fawn killer... yet. It can be downloaded from: http://fedoraproject.org/
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 11 September 2007 10:16 )
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