[Fwd: Announcing the release of Fedora 15 (Lovelock)]

[JD]

On 05/24/11 07:38, Mike Chambers wrote:
> Case anyone hadn't heard yet.  So yes am top posting this one.
>
> Mike Chambers
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Jared K. Smith<jsmith at fedoraproject.org>
> Reply-to: users at lists.fedoraproject.org
> To: announce at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Subject: Announcing the release of Fedora 15 (Lovelock)
> Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 10:04:23 -0400
>
> 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.
>
> ==== For developers ====
>
> For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:
>
> * Robotics Suite -- Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a
> collection of packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics
> development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite
> features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments,
> utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into an
> easy-to-install package group. Refer to
> https://rmattes.blogspot.com/2011/05/fedora-15-robotics-suite.html for
> more details.  Thanks to Tim Niemueller and Rich Mattes,  Fedora
> community volunteers for their participation.
>
> * GCC 4.6 --  GCC 4.6 is the system default compiler in Fedora 15 and
> all the relevant packages have been rebuilt in Fedora 15 using it.
> Developers can realize compiled code improvements and use the newly
> added features, such as improved C++0x support, support for the Go
> language, REAL*16 support in Fortran and many other improvements.
> Thanks to Jakub Jelinek from Red Hat for upstream participation and
> leading the integration in Fedora.
>
> * GDB 7.3 --  This new GDB release 7.3 together with Archer and Fedora
> extensions improves the debugging experience on Fedora by making the
> debugger more powerful. The majority of these features were written by
> Red Hat engineers, thus benefiting all gdb users. New features for the
> Fedora 15 release include support for breakpoints at SystemTap markers
> (probes), support for using labels in the program's source, OpenCL
> language debugging support,  thread debugging of core dumps and Python
> scripting improvements.  Numerous important packages within Fedora are
> pre-built with SystemTap static markers, and these can now be used as
> the target for breakpoints in gdb.  Thanks to Jan Kratochvil and other
> GDB developers from Red Hat for their upstream participation and
> integration of this functionality.
>
> * Programming language updates --  Python 3.2:  The system Python 3
> stack has been upgraded to 3.2 (the system Python 2 stack remains at
> 2.7), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes
> refer to https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html.  OCaml 3.12:
> OCaml 3.12 is a major revision of the OCaml programming language, the
> camlp4 macro language, libraries, and CDuce for XML processing. Rails
> 3.0.5:  Rails 3 is a large update to the Ruby on Rails web framework.
> It brings many new features such as a polished routing API, new
> activemailer and activerecord APIs, and many more new enhancements.
> Thanks to Dave Malcolm, Richard W.M. Jones and Mo Morsi, Red Hat
> developers leading the integration of the respective features in this
> release.
>
> * Maven 3 -- Maven 3.0 offers better stability and performance
> compared to previous versions and a lot of work under the hood to
> simplify writing Maven plugins and further improve performance by
> building projects in parallel.  Refer to
> https://maven.apache.org/docs/3.0/release-notes.html for more
> information.   Fedora still provides maven2 package to support
> backward compatibility where needed. Thanks to Red Hat developer,
> Stanislav Ochotnický for the work in this feature.
>
> ==== For system administrators ====
>
> And don't think we forgot the system administrators:
>
> * systemd system and session manager --   systemd is a system and
> session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts.
> systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket
> and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting
> of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports
> snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and
> automount points and implements a powerful transactional
> dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in
> replacement for sysvinit.  A related change is /var/run and /var/lock
> are mounted from tmpfs and results in a simpler, more faster and
> robust boot-up scheme and aligns to the default configuration of
> several other distributions. Thanks to Lennart Poettering,  Rahul
> Sundaram. Michal Schmidt, Bill Nottingham and others from Red Hat for
> leading development and integration of systemd as the default init
> system in this release and many Fedora community volunteers for their
> extensive testing and feedback.
>
> * Dynamic firewall -- Dynamic firewall makes it possible to change
> firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and  makes
> persistent connections possible.  This is for example very useful for
> services, that need to add additional firewall rules including
> virtualization (libvirtd) and VPN(openvpn). With the static firewall
> model these rules are lost if the firewall gets modified or restarted.
> The firewall daemon (firewalld) holds the current configuration
> internally and is able to modify the firewall without the need to
> recreate the complete firewall configuration; it is also able to
> restore the configuration in a service restart and reload case.
> Another use case for the dynamic firewall mode is printer discovery.
> For this the discovery program will be started locally that sends out
> a broadcast message. It will most likely get an answer from an unknown
> address (the new printer). This answer will be filtered by the
> firewall, because the answer is not related to the broadcast and the
> port of the program that was sending out the message is dynamic and
> therefore a fixed rule can not be created for this.  It also has a
> D-BUS interface to allow clients or services to request firewall
> changes.  firewall-cmd (part of firewalld package) is a very simple
> yet powerful user space alternative to the iptables command: for
> instance,  firewall-cmd --enable --service=samba --timeout=10 opens
> the appropriate ports for Samba for only ten seconds.  Since the
> current implementation is a proof of concept, in this release, it is
> available in the Fedora software repository but not installed by
> default. The plan is to make it the default firewall solution in the
> next release. Thanks to Thomas Woerner from Red Hat for developing
> this feature.
>
> * BoxGrinder appliance creator --  BoxGrinder is a set of free and
> open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual
> machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2).  BoxGrinder
> creates appliances from simple plain text appliance definition files.
> Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for upstream
> participation and bringing this feature into Fedora.
>
> * Spice integration in Virt Manager --   With Fedora 15, virt-manager
> has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution
> for interaction with virtualized desktops.  It is now possible to
> create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the
> command line, easily taking advantage of all the Spice enhancements
> directly from virt-manager.  Spice provides better performance and
> additional functionality (such as copy/paste between guest and host)
> compared to using VNC.  Thanks to the spice-gtk library, a new client
> can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection
> bindings.  Thanks to Marc-André Lureau,  Red Hat developer, for
> leading development of this feature.
>
> * Consistent network device naming --  Servers often have multiple
> Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI
> cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has
> been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX
> names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports
> will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations,
> rather than ethX.  By changing the naming convention, system
> administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical
> port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into
> some "sane" order. This feature is enabled on all physical systems
> that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later.
> Thanks to Jordan Hargrave, Matt Domsch and several other engineers
> from Dell for their long term upstream participation and collaboration
> with Fedora in integration of this feature.
>
> * Setuid removal --  Fedora 15 removes setuid in several applications
> and instead specifically assigns the capabilities required by each
> application to improve security by reducing the impact of any
> potential vulnerabilities in these applications.  Thanks to Daniel
> Walsh from Red Hat for leading the integration of this feature.
>
> *  Improved support for encrypted home directory --  Fedora 15 brings
> in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem
> for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to
> automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory
> when a user logs in.  Thanks to Paolo Bonzini from Red Hat for
> integration of this feature.
>
> * RPM 4.9.0 package manager -- RPM 4.9.0 brings a number of immediate
> benefits to Fedora including the pluggable dependency generator,
> built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package
> ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements and many
> bugfixes.  More details at  https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0,
> Thanks to Panu Matilainen from Red Hat and other RPM developers for
> their participation and help in integration of this feature in this
> release.
>
> * Tryton ERP system --  Tryton is a three-tier general-purpose
> application platform and basis for an ERP (Enterprise Resource
> Planning) system.  Currently, the main modules available for Tryton
> cover accounting, invoicing, sale management, purchase management,
> analytic accounting and inventory management   Thanks to Dan Horák,
> Fedora community volunteer for integration of this feature.
>
> And that's only the beginning.  A more complete list with details of
> all the new features on board Fedora 15 is available at:
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList?anF15
>
> == Download and upgrading ==
>
> OK, go get it.  You know you can't wait.
>
> * https://get.fedoraproject.org/?anF15
>
> If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?anF15
>
> For a quick tour of features in Fedora 15 and pictures of many friends
> of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_one_page_release_notes?anF15
>
> Fedora 15 full release and technical notes and guides for several
> languages are available at:
>
> * https://docs.fedoraproject.org/?anF15
>
> Fedora 15 common bugs are documented at:
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs?anF15
>
> === Fedora spins ===
>
> Fedora spins are alternate versions of Fedora tailored for various
> types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations.
> Fedora spins include those providing alternative desktop environments
> like KDE, Xfce and LXDE by default but also more specialized ones such
> as Fedora Security Lab, Fedora Electronics Lab and Fedora Design
> Suite.  More information on these spins and much more is available at
>
> * https://spins.fedoraproject.org/?anF15
>
> == Looking forward to Fedora 16 (Verne) ==
>
> Our next release, Fedora 16 codename is named after and to honor,
> Jules Verne.  Jules Verne is considered a father of science-fiction.
> He was a science-fiction writer and futurist, best known for novels
> such as "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea".  More information at
>
> * https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jules_Verne
>
> Fedora's awesome design team is already busy at work creating artwork
> based on this concept and you are welcome to join the team
>
> * https://mairin.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/design-team-imageboard-test-server-and-we-need-fedora-16-theme-artists/
>
> Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes
> to improve the Fedora 15 experience, our next release, Fedora 16, 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 2011 release:
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule?anF15
>
> Features planned for Fedora 16 include the default use of Btrfs as the
> next generation filesystem, GRUB 2 bootloader by default, further
> enhancements to systemd system and session manager, dynamic firewall
> by default and much much more.  Watch the feature list page for
> updates.
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList?anF15
>
> Join us today and help improve free and open source software and lead
> the future of Linux.
>
> == We need your help! ==
>
> Our rapid release cycle and innovative features are a direct result of
> development of thousands of upstream projects and collaboration by a
> large distributed and diverse community with many volunteers and
> organizations across the globe, participating in the free and open
> source software community and within Fedora. Fedora strives to bring
> these thousands of upstream projects together and serves as a
> integration point for them and for our users and contributors.  Red
> Hat, the leading provider of open source solutions is a partner in our
> community and major sponsor of the Fedora project. To continue to
> advance and bring you the best of free software quickly and robustly.
> we are always looking for more people to join us in the Fedora
> community. You don't have to be a dazzling software programmer to
> participate and join us in developing Fedora although if you are one,
> you are welcome too! There are many ways to contribute beyond
> programming. You can report bugs, help translate software and content,
> test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit
> documentation, design and do artwork, perform system administration on
> our infrastructure, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and
> package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide
> and more. Whether you are a Linux kernel hacker or just a newcomer,
> there is always something for everyone to pitch in.
>
> To get started, visit https://join.fedoraproject.org today!
>
> == Contact information ==
>
> If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at:
>
> * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press?anF15
What an incredibly rapid release cycle.
We just installed F14 official release last November!
I will have to wait until all the packages I have installed
are recompiled for F15. I think that takes a long time.
I have 4235 installed rpm's.
Not sure if all of them will make it into F15.
Probably not, judging by past experience.