The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project announces the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open-source operating system. In addition to the new version of the operating system, the Fedora Project announces the Fedora Community, a portal project now in beta.
The Red Hat-sponsored
Fedora Project on
June 9 announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free
open-source operating system.
Red Hat officials said the community's 11th release includes the broadest
feature set to date; spotlights developments in software management and sound;
improves key virtualization components; and introduces Fedora Community, a
portal project now in beta.
Check out Fedora 11's features here.
"The Fedora 11 release showcases a feature set that shows the strength and
diversity of Fedora contributors' interests in the evolution of open source,"
said Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat. "We've built several of
the major features on the foundations established in previous releases, showing
that the open-source development model can provide a compelling mixture of
steady advancement and rapid innovation."
The Fedora Project aims to release a new complete, general-purpose, no-cost
operating system approximately every six months. The development cycle is
purposely restricted to six months to encourage rapid innovation and
collaboration between thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide.
Fedora now has almost 29,000 project members, community officials said.
According to a
Fedora
Team blog on Red Hat's site, Fedora 11, code-named "Leonidas,"
contains the broadest set of features yet for a Fedora release, including:
-
New fingerprint reader
support that makes biometric support easy and well-integrated
-
Automatic font and
mimetype installation that downloads support as needed for foreign-language
documents and other content types
-
New IBus input method
system that makes it easy to switch locales without having to restart a session
-
Improved kernel mode-setting
features for more video cards, including many models of Intel, ATI
and NVidia
-
Support for the latest
file systems like ext4, with much higher device and file size limits, and
faster consistency checking
-
Improved virtualization
features such as a more flexible and interactive console, and a rewritten VM
creation wizard
-
MinGW cross-compiler tool
set for creating Windows executables using the Fedora distribution
Red Hat officials said the foundational work for Fedora 11's kernel mode
setting feature was completed as part of Fedora 10, which supported a small
subset of ATI Radeon-based video cards. The
feature is designed to shorten boot times and present a cleaner interface to
users by letting the kernel do the work of initially displaying a graphical
screen during the startup process, the company said.
The Fedora Community project aims to streamline the interface that Fedora
community members use to contribute code and interact with the community. The
portal features a dashboard that tracks contributions, conversations and
updates in a simple graphical interface. The beta test of the portal focuses on
software package maintainers; community members will have an opportunity to
comment and improve Fedora Community as it develops throughout this year, Red
Hat said.
"The Fedora Community portal project is going to provide new ways to engage
our community members and improve the way they collaborate," said Frields in a
statement. "The portal project uses a new Web framework, built on best-of-breed
open-source components, that has the capability to provide a more real-time
experience. Ultimately, we intend for this portal to become a single, simple
and usable online tool our community members can customize to produce and
organize their Fedora contributions."
For more information on Fedora 11 or to download it or join the Fedora
Community, go to
http://fedoraproject.org/.
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