Announcing Fedora 13

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Tue May 25 14:03:40 UTC 2010


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I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 13, the latest innovative
Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative
partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat.

If you can't wait to get the distribution, simply visit:
  http://get.fedoraproject.org?F13an

If you want a quick tour of highlights in this release, check out:
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_one_page_release_notes?F13an

You can also find this announcement text at:
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_announcement?F13an

Or read on for loads of information about the new release and all the
leading edge technologies we've packed into it.  More links are
available at the end of this message, too.  Enjoy!

* * *

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 13! 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, netbooks,
virtualization and system administration.

== What's New in Fedora 13? ==

=== For desktop users ===

A universe of new features for end users:

* Streamlined Installer. The user interface of Anaconda, the Fedora
  installer, has changed to handle storage devices and partitioning in
  an easy and streamlined manner, with helpful hints in the right
  places. Thanks to Chris Lumens and others on the Anaconda team, and
  Máirín Duffy, Fedora Design team lead, for her user interface
  review.

* Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and PackageKit
  for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a
  printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it
  if needed. Thanks to Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes.

* New desktop applications and enhancements. The Shotwell photo
  manager, Deja-dup backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client,
  and Simple Scan scanning utility are all delivered by default to
  provide an enhanced desktop experience out of the box. Palimpsest,
  the desktop utility for handling storage devices, can now manage LVM
  and RAID disks easily. As with the past several releases, Fedora 13
  includes enhanced webcam support. Hans de Goede from Red Hat has
  specially focussed on better support for dual mode camera's for this
  release.

* NetworkManager improvements include better Mobile Broadband,
  Bluetooth, and new CLI abilities. NetworkManager was introduced in
  Fedora 7 and has become the de facto network configuration solution
  for distributions everywhere. NetworkManager is now a one-stop shop
  for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up,
  broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. In Fedora 13 NetworkManager adds
  mobile broadband enhancements to show signal strength; support for
  old-style dial-up networking (DUN) over Bluetooth; and command line
  support in addition to the improved graphical user interface. Thanks
  to Dan Williams of Red Hat for his extensive work on these features
  upstream and within Fedora.

* Color management. Do you like your printouts to look the same as
  they do on screen - or your scanner output to look the same as what
  you just scanned? Color Management allows you to better set and
  control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through
  the gnome-color-manager package. Thanks to Richard Hughes from Red
  Hat for his involvement upstream and in Fedora.

* Enhanced iPod functionality. Newer Apple iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone
  models are supported by some of your favorite photo management
  software and music library applications such as Rhythmbox. The
  devices are automatically attached using the libimobiledevice
  library, so you can work with your content more easily.

* Enhanced streaming and buffering support in Totem. Totem's Movie
  Player and web browser plugins are now better at handling large
  streaming media, such as HD movies and Podcasts, thanks to the new
  disk-buffering support in GStreamer.

* 3D support for ATI cards (R600 and R700) via Radeon driver. In
  Fedora 13, 3D support for many ATI cards has moved out of
  experimental status and is enabled by default. 2D support for the
  latest generation (R800) is integrated as well in this
  release. Thanks to Red Hat's Dave Airlie and many others for
  involvement upstream and in Fedora.

* Experimental 3D graphics support extended to free Nouveau driver for
  NVidia cards. This release also adds experimental 3D support to a
  wide range of NVidia cards, adding them to the list of liberated
  video capabilities. Install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
  package to try out the work in progress. Thanks to Red Hat's Ben
  Skeggs for involvement upstream and in Fedora.

* KDE improvements. KDE in Fedora continues to provide tight
  integration with the latest technologies in Fedora. In this release,
  we have improved integration with PulseAudio via Phonon and the
  volume control KMix, which controls per-application volumes and
  moves application sounds between hardware devices, as well as with
  the latest PolicyKit authorization framework. We have also
  integrated new major versions, based on the KDE Development Platform
  4, of the KOffice office suite, the K3b CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning
  application and, for developers, the KDevelop IDE, which provide
  better integration with the KDE 4 Plasma Desktop and no longer
  require the KDE 3 compatibility libraries. Thanks to the work of a
  growing community of KDE contributors in Fedora.

* DisplayPort support improvements. Fedora 12 added initial support
  for the new DisplayPort display connector for Intel graphics
  chips. Support for Nvidia and ATI systems has now been added in this
  release. Thanks to Red Hat's Xorg team.

* Experimental user management interface. The user account tool has
  been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and
  accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to
  configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or
  icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options for
  your Fedora system. Try out the work in progress. Thanks to Matthias
  Clasen from Red Hat's Desktop team and others.

=== For developers ===

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

* SystemTap static probes. SystemTap now has expanded capabilities to
  monitor higher-level language runtimes like Java, Python, and Tcl,
  and also user space applications, starting with PostgreSQL. In the
  future, Fedora will add support for even more user space
  applications, greatly increasing the scope and power of monitoring
  for application developers. Thanks to Mark Wielaard from Red Hat.

* Easier Python debugging. We've added new support that allows
  developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in Fedora
  to get more complete information when debugging with gdb, making
  Fedora an exceptional platform for powerful, rapid application
  development. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.

* Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable Python
  3 stack will help programmers write and test code for use in both
  Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, so you can future-proof your
  applications now using Fedora. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.

* NetBeans Java EE 6 support. The NetBeans 6.8 integrated development
  environment is the first IDE to offer complete support for the
  entire Java EE 6 specification. Thanks to Victor G. Vasilyev from
  Sun/Oracle for his maintenance and support of NetBeans in
  collaboration with Fedora.

* IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Java IDE. Along with Eclipse and
  NetBeans already provided by Fedora, IDEA is a popular Java-based
  development environment newly introduced in this release. It comes
  with an intuitive GUI, integration with Ant and Maven, extensive
  language support, version control systems and test tools integration
  and compatibility with Eclipse projects. Thanks to Lubomir Rintel
  and Michal Ingeli, Fedora community volunteers, for packaging and
  integration of this feature.

=== For system administrators ===

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

* boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO). BFO allows users to download a single,
  tiny image (could fit on a floppy) and install current and future
  versions of Fedora without having to download additional
  images. Thanks to Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure lead.

* System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded
  features for logging into managed domains, including caching for
  offline authentication. Now users on laptops can still login when
  disconnected from the company's managed network. The authentication
  configuration tool in Fedora has already been updated to support
  SSSD, and work is underway to make it even more attractive and
  functional. Thanks to Stephen Gallagher from Red Hat.

* Pioneering NFS features. Fedora offers the latest version 4 of the
  NFS protocol for better performance, and, in conjunction with recent
  kernel modifications, includes IPv6 support for NFS as well. Thanks
  to Steve Dickson from Red Hat.

* Zarafa Open Source edition Groupware. Zarafa Open Source edition is
  a complete, 100% free and open source groupware suite that can be
  used as a drop-in Microsoft Exchange replacement for Web-based mail,
  calendaring, collaboration, and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP and
  iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the ability
  to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full set of
  programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel using modern
  Ajax technologies. Thanks to Robert Scheck, Fedora community
  volunteer, for packaging and integration of this feature.

* Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating
  lightweight, copy-on-write filesystem snapshots that can be mounted
  (and booted into) selectively. Automated snapshots allow system
  owners to easily revert to a filesystem from the previous day, or
  from before a yum update using the yum-plugin-fs-snapshot
  plugin. Btrfs is still an experimental filesystem in this release
  and requires a "btrfs" installation option to enable support for
  it. (This option is only available for non-live images.) Upcoming
  releases will integrate the snapshot functionality into the desktop
  while working on stabilization of the filesystem in parallel. Thanks
  to Josef Bacik, Btrfs filesystem developer at Red Hat, for
  filesystem work and the new yum plugin and Chris Ball from OLPC team
  for leading this effort.

* LVM Snapshots merging support. Recent LVM (and device-mapper)
  snapshot advances included in Fedora 13 allow system owners to merge
  an LVM snapshot back into the origin. In the process you can
  rollback the origin LV to the state it was in before the system
  upgrade. As noted earlier, the yum-snapshot-fs-plugin can work with
  both Btrfs and LVM volumes exposing this functionality and making it
  easier to use. This feature was developed and merged upstream by Red
  Hat's storage team.

* Virtualization enhancements. Fedora continues its leadership in
  virtualization technologies with improvements to KVM such as Stable
  PCI Addresses and Virt Shared Network Interface technologies. Having
  stable PCI addresses will enable virtual guests to retain PCI
  addresses' space on a host machine. The shared network interface
  technology enables virtual machines to use the same physical network
  interface cards (NICs) as the host operating system. Fedora 13 also
  enhances performance of virtualization via VHostNet acceleration of
  KVM networking, Virtx2apic for enhanced guest performance on large
  multi-processor systems, and Virtio-Serial for simple IO between the
  guest and host user spaces. Thanks to the Red Hat virtualization
  team for their ongoing contributions.

* Dogtag Certificate System Dogtag is an enterprise-class open source
  Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate
  lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smart card
  management. Brought into the fold as part of the Red Hat acquisition
  of Netscape technologies, this certificate server is fully free and
  open source and now included in Fedora. Thanks to the PKI team at
  Red Hat.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of
all the new features on board Fedora 13 is available at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList?F13an

OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.

http://get.fedoraproject.org?F13an

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?F13an

In particular, Fedora has made preupgrade a more robust solution and
pushed several bug fixes to older releases of Fedora to enable an easy
upgrade to Fedora 13.

For an quick tour of features in Fedora 13 and pictures of many
friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_one_page_release_notes?F13an

Fedora 13 full release notes and guides for several languages are
available at:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/?F13an

Fedora 13 common bugs are documented at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs?F13an

=== Fedora Spins ===

Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various
types of users via hand-picked application set or
customizations. Fedora 13 includes four completely new spins in
addition to the several already available, including Fedora Security
Lab, Design Suite, Sugar on a Stick and Moblin spin. More information
on these spins and much more is available at

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/?F13an

== Power PC Support ==

With Apple moving to Intel based machines and Sony PlayStation
dropping Linux support, Fedora PowerPC (PPC) usage has dropped
considerably. In Fedora 13, PPC is now a secondary architecture and
the Fedora release engineering team no longer manages PPC releases. If
you would like to participate in the PPC effort or any of the
secondary architecture teams, refer to:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures?F13an

== Contributing ==

For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to
report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the
release notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/?F13an

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help
translate software and content, test and give feedback on software
updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help
with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software
for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit
http://join.fedoraproject.org today!

== Fedora 14 ==

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes
to improve the Fedora 13 experience, our next release, Fedora 14, is
already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active
development for several months already. We have an early schedule for
an end of Oct 2010 release:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/Schedule?F13an

== Contact information ==

If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional
information at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press?F13an



- -- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com
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