First pre-release version of Fedora 14

The Fedora Project has released the first and only alpha version of its Fedora 14 Linux distribution, code named "Laughlin". Like so many alpha, beta and final versions of Fedora, it was released one week later than originally planned – the upshot of which was a long debate between Fedora developers resulting in the final release date for Fedora 14 being put back a week to November 2nd.

The most profound change is a behind the scenes switch to systemd, an alternative to sysvinit and upstart released in May. Lately Fedora has been using upstart to launch the system and services, but has continued to use sysvinit scripts. The current state of systemd development and background information on the state of integration into Fedora is summarised by Lennart Poettering, the main developer behind systemd, in a post on his blog. In discussions on systemd on LWN-net, he has stated that faster booting is just one of many objectives for systemd – some systems boot significantly faster with systemd, whereas others see little difference.

The inclusion of Rakudo Star, the first "useful and usable distribution of Perl 6", in Fedora 14 is new, as well as a compiler and toolkit for programming in D. The alpha version of the distribution, named after physicist Robert B. Laughlin, is based on Linux kernel 2.6.35. The alpha includes version 4.5.0 of KDE's Plasma desktop and version 0.90 of the Sugar Learning Environment. It also includes a pre-release version of GNOME 2.32. As in the current Fedora 13, parts of GNOME 3, which was originally scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 14, are available from the standard package repositories.

Like its predecessor, Fedora 14 will also be available in various 'spins', including one which makes use of the Moblin interface, now incorporated as MeeGo "Netbook UX" (user experience). Further details on what's in Fedora 14 can be found in the alpha release announcement, the list of new features and in the release notes. The wiki also includes an overview of bugs affecting a large user base.

See also:

• New Fedora Project Leader appointed, a report from The H.
• Rock it - What's new in Fedora 13, a feature from The H.
• Fedora 14 to be named Laughlin, a report from The H.

(crve)