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Let the celebrations begin! Fedora 15 is officially here!
Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that
continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new
release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and
greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 15! Join us and share the joy
of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have
several major new features with special focus on desktops, developers,
virtualization, security and system administration.
=== What's new in Fedora 15 (Lovelock)? ===
==== For desktop users ====
A universe of new features for end users:
* GNOME 3 desktop environment -- GNOME 3 is the next generation of
GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new
and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and
technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include
GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive
upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers,
and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new
user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and
several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available
in the Fedora software repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team
developers and community volunteers.
* Btrfs filesystem -- Btrfs, the next generation filesystem is being
developed with upstream participation of Red Hat developers, Oracle
and many others. Btrfs is now available as a menu item in the
installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4)
and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in
the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a
incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem
in the next release of Fedora. The btrfsck program for performing
filesystem checks is under active development upstream with
participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is
still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain
backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!).
Thanks to Josef Bacik, Red Hat Btrfs developer, for his upstream
participation and integration of this feature in Fedora including a
yum plugin (yum-plugin-fs-snapshot) that enables users to rollback
updates if necessary, taking advantage of Btrfs snapshots.
* Indic typing booster -- Indic typing booster is a predictive input
method for the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on
partial input, and users can simply select a word from the suggestion
list and improve their typing speed and accuracy. Thanks to the
development led by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team
engineers in Pune, India.
* Better crash reporting -- ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora,
can now perform a part of crash processing remotely, on a Fedora
Project server. Remote coredump retracing avoids users having to
download a large amount of debug information and leads to better
quality reports. The retrace server can generate good backtraces with
a much higher success rate than local retracing.
* Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter -- SELinux troubleshooter is a
graphical tool that watches and analyses log files and automatically
provides solutions to common issues. In this release, this tool has
been redesigned to be simpler but provide more solutions at the same
time. Thanks to Dan Walsh, SELinux developer at Red Hat, for leading
the development of this functionality.
* Higher compression in live images -- Live images in this release
use XZ compression instead of gzip as in older releases, making them
smaller (about 10%) to download or providing more space for
applications to be made available by default. Thanks to Bruno Wolff
III, Fedora community volunteer, for integrating this functionality in
Fedora Live CD tools. Thanks to Phillip Lougher for his work on
squashfs and Lasse Collin for getting XZ squashfs support in the
upstream Linux kernel.
* Better power management -- Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and
better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils
for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that
tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption
and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to
selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes,
improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency. Thanks to
Jaroslav Škarvada, Red Hat developer, for integrating the newer
powertop and pm-utils, as well as performing power measurement and
benchmarking. Thanks to Jan Včelák, Red Hat developer, for developing
tuned and integrating the newer version in this release.
* LibreOffice productivity suite -- LibreOffice is a community-driven
and developed free and open source personal productivity suite which
is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document
Foundation. It is a fork of OpenOffice.org with a diverse community
of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many
volunteers. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this
release. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream
participation and for maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.
* Firefox 4 web browser -- A new major version of this popular browser
from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release.
Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster
than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync,
native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format,
HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface. Thanks to
Christopher Aillon from Red Hat and others for integrating Firefox 4
in this release.
* KDE plasma workspaces 4.6 and Xfce 4.8 desktop environments --
Fedora 15 includes new major versions of these alternative desktop
environments. Fedora also provides dedicated KDE Plasma Workspaces
and Xfce installable live images that include these desktop
environments by default. Thanks to Red Hat developers and other Fedora
community volunteers, part of KDE and Xfce special interest groups.
* Sugar .92 learning platform -- Sugar is a desktop environment
originally designed for the OLPC project which has now evolved into a
learning platform developed by the non-profit Sugar Labs foundation.
This version provides major usability improvements for the first login
screen and the control panel, as well as new features such as support
for 3G networks. Thanks to Peter Robinson and Sebastian Dziallas,
Fedora community volunteers, for leading the integration of this
environment.
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