F11 Talking Points

This page contains the highest-level talking points for the Fedora 11 release. When adding to this page, consider points that have a wide appeal, and consider whether or not there is a "bigger picture" that needs to be described. In some cases, a feature is part of a multi-release arc of work, and that context can be useful to provide.

Features

For desktop users and everyone

• Automatic font and mime-type installation - PackageKit was introduced in Fedora 9 as a cross-distro software management application for users. The capabilities it offers thanks to integration with the desktop became more visible in Fedora 10, where it provided automatic codec installation. Now in Fedora 11, PackageKit extends this functionality with the ability to automatically install fonts where needed for viewing and editing documents. It also includes the capability to install handlers for specific content types as needed. Some work is still being completed to provide automatic installation of applications.

• Volume Control - Currently, people using Fedora have to go through many levels of mixers to properly set up sound sources. These are all exposed in the volume control on the desktop, making for a very confusing user experience. PulseAudio allows us to unify the volume controls in one interface that makes setting up sound easier and more pain-free.

• Intel, ATI and Nvidia kernel modesetting - Fedora 10 provided the first steps by a major distribution into using the kernel modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. We indicated at the time that we would be adding greater support for additional video cards as time went on. KMS originally was featured only on some ATI cards. In Fedora 11, this work is extended to include many more video cards, including Intel and Nvidia, and additional ATI as well. Although not fully complete, we have increased enormously the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with more to come.

• Fingerprint - Extensive work has been done to make fingerprint readers easy to use as an authentication mechanism. Currently, using fingerprint readers is a bit of a pain, and installing/using fprint and its pam module take more time than should ever be necessary. The goal of this feature is to make it painless by providing all the required pieces in Fedora, together with nicely integrated configuration. This needs to be rewritten with more specificity on what users will see and experience.

For system administrators

• Filesystem - Ext4 is the now the default FS in Fedora. The ext4 filesystem has more features and generally better performance than ext3, which is showing its age in the Linux filesystem world. Needs to include more specificity about what the benefits are; not everything, just a small sample of the gains.

For developers

• MinGW (Windows cross compiler) - Fedora 11 will provide MinGW, a development environment for Fedora users who wish to cross-compile their programs to run on Windows without having to use Windows. In the past developers have had to port and compile all of the libraries and tools they have needed, and this huge effort has happened independently many times over. MinGW eliminates duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools already ported to the cross-compiler environment. Developers don't have to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.

Other changes

• Moksha - Moksha is a revolutionary new framework for building live information delivery on the Web. Built with best-of-breed underlying technologies such as TurboGears 2, AQMP, and jQuery, Moksha will allow real-time collaboration and information flow across the entire Fedora Project, bringing the community dashboard to life and people closer together than ever before. Moksha is yet another innovative Fedora Hosted project to which anyone can contribute.