9:44 a.m.
Mark your calendars, and get ready to go exploring: The release of
Fedora 16, codenamed "Verne," is scheduled for release in early
November. Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating
system that continues to bring everyone fresh, innovative features
with each release, delighting users worldwide every six months.
We are proud to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 16.
Come see why we love Fedora so much. We are betting you will, too.
Download it now:
http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease?anF16b
== What is the Beta Release? ==
The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 16. Only
critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general
release of Fedora 16 in early November. We invite you to join us in
making Fedora 16 a solid release by downloading, testing, and
providing your valuable feedback.
Of course, this is a beta release, meaning that some problems may
still be lurking. A list of the problems we already know about is
found at the Common F16 bugs page, seen here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs
== Features ==
This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and
under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the
advancing state of free software. Examples include:
* System Boot. Fedora 16 introduces GRUB2, the long-awaited
next-generation boot-loader for Linux. GRUB2 automatically recognizes
other operating systems, supports LVM2 and LUKS partitions, and is
more customizable than the previous version. In this release, only x86
systems with a BIOS uses GRUB2 by default. Work is ongoing for making
GRUB2 the default for other architectures and systems.
* Services Management. Fedora 15 introduced the Systemd services
management program. This release features better integration of
Systemd via conversion to native systemd services from legacy init
scripts in many software components -- for desktop users, this means
faster boot times; for system administrators it means more powerful
management of services.
* Desktop Updates. The two major desktop environments have been
updated to the latest releases: KDE Software Compilation 4.7 and GNOME
3.1 development release.
* SELinux Enhancements. SELinux policy package now includes a
pre-built policy that will only rebuild policy if any customizations
have been made. A sample test run shows 4 times speedup on installing
the package from 48 Seconds to 12 Seconds and max memory usage from
38M to 6M. In addition to that, SELinux file name transition allows
better policy management. For instance, policy writers can take
advantage of this and write a policy rule that states, if a SELinux
unconfined process creates a file named resolv.conf in a directory
labelled etc_t, the file should get labeled appropriately. This
results is less chances of mislabeled files. Also, from this release
onwards, selinuxfs is mounted at /sys/fs/selinux instead of in
/selinux. All the affected components including anaconda, dracut,
livecd-tools and policycoreutils have been modified to work with this
change.
* System Accounts. Fedora now standardizes on login.defs as
authority for UID/GID space allocation, and has moved boundary between
system and user accounts from 500 to 1000 to match conventions
followed by several other Linux distributions. Upgrading from a
existing release will not be affected by this change and you can use
kickstart to override this change during installation if necessary.
* HAL Removal. HAL, a hardware abstraction layer which has been a
deprecated component for several releases, has been completely removed
from all Fedora spins and DVD. Software components using HAL have
moved over to using udisks and upower as well as libudev for device
discovery. This results in faster system bootup and faster startup for
applications depending on device discovery.
* Cloud Updates. Fedora now includes a number of new and improved
features to support cloud computing, including HekaFS, a "cloud ready"
version of GlusterFS, including additional auth*/crypto/multi-tenancy;
pacemaker-cloud, application service high availability in a cloud
environment; and IaaS implementations such as Aeolus and OpenStack.
* Virtualization. Once again Fedora raises the bar on
virtualization support, including expanded virtual network support, an
improved Spice for managing virtual machines, restored Xen support, a
new virtual machine lock manager, and improved ability to browse guest
file systems.
* Developer Improvements. Developers get many goodies with Verne,
including updated Ada, Haskell and Perl environments, a new Python
plugin for GCC and a number of new and improved APIs.
And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all
the new features in Fedora 16 is available here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList
We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/
== Contributing to Fedora ==
For more information on 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
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, 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!