Fedora 15's Lovelock released

The Fedora developers have announced the release of Fedora 15, the latest version of their free and open source Linux based operating system. Fedora 15, named Lovelock, features the recently released GNOME 3 desktop environment, improved support at installation time for the Btrfs file system, better crash reporting, a refined SELinux troubleshooter, 10% better compressed live images and better tuned power management.

Other updates include the latest edition of LibreOffice, switching away from OpenOffice.org, Firefox 4 web browser, the latest KDE plasma workspaces (4.6) and Xfce 4.8 and the Sugar .92 learning platform. Developers will find GCC 4.6, GDB 7.3, Python 3.2 (and system default Python 2.7), Ocaml 3.12, Rails 3.0.5 and Maven 3. Other changes include the addition of a predictive input method for Indian languages along with the addition of a rupee sign support for input and output. There is also 4K sector boot disk support for UEFI machines.

System administrators will find that Fedora 15 comes with the systemd system and session manager which enables aggressive parallelisation of startup processes, on-demand daemon startup and cgroup management.There is also a dynamic firewall which allows for changes without restarting or resetting persistent connections, Boxgrinder, a virtual appliance creator, Spice VDI integration in virt-manager, consistent network device naming, fewer applications with setuid set and better encrypted home directory support. RPM 4.9.0 is used for package management and Tryton ERP has been added as a general-purpose application platform.

For a full listing of the Fedora 15 features, see the Feature List on the Fedora Wiki. Release notes are also available as is full documentation. Fedora 15 is available to download from the get.fedoraproject.org site as Live CD images, DVD ISO and other formats for 32- and 64-bit x86 base platforms. There are also a number of Spins of Fedora 15 available including KDE, LXDE and Xfce desktop spins along with security, hardware design, graphic design and games spins.

Details on these and many other new features in Fedora 15 can be found in a feature article entitled "What's new in Fedora 15" from The H Open.

(djwm)