Beta version of Fedora 15 includes GNOME 3 and systemd
The Fedora Project has made the first and only beta of Fedora 15 available for download. This should signal the end to major changes for the Linux distribution, which is scheduled for release in late May. The focus is now on rounding off any rough edges and bug fixing.
Fedora 15 will be the first major Linux distribution to include GNOME 3, which was released two weeks ago. Fedora 15 will not include GNOME 2; the KDE Plasma Desktop will be a member of the 4.6 series. The Fedora Project has also undertaken a major behind the scenes change, so that Fedora 15 will see a switch from Upstart to the sysvinit and Upstart alternative systemd, which was first introduced just under a year ago. The kernel in the beta is based on Linux version 2.6.38. LibreOffice will fill the office suite shoes and the C and C++-Compiler will be the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.6.
The Fedora Project is aiming to make a release candidate available around 10 May, though it doesn't normally make such a big deal of this as it does with the alphas and betas. Whether or not the development team will keep to this schedule remains to be seen, with a little deadline slippage pretty much par for the course at Fedora. Fedora 15 development is already a couple of weeks behind the original schedule, with both alpha and beta coming out one week later than planned and thereby pushing back all subsequent deadlines. The main cause of the delay for the beta was merging a pre-release version of NetworkManager 0.9.0 – the development team was keen not to omit this, as it offers better integration with GNOME 3 than the current version.
Work on Fedora 16 in the Rawhide developer tree, which is updated daily, has been ongoing since the alpha was released. The Fedora developers have now voted to christen the next version Verne – Fedora 14 went by the appellation Lovelock. The inspirations behind the names were Jules Verne and James Lovelock, both futurologists. Consecutive Fedora version names always have some sort of connection, the nature of which differs between each pair of versions.
See also:
- Announcing the release of Fedora 15 Beta!!, Fedora Project mailing list post.
(crve)