Fedora 17 Alpha release notes

Filing Bug Reports
Please file bug reports on this Alpha release if you find any problems.

Known Issues
Refer to the Common F17 bugs page for a listing of issues, and any known resolutions, commonly found with this release. This page is maintained throughout the Fedora 17 developmental cycle.

Release Overview
As always, Fedora continues to develop and  integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are set for inclusion in Fedora 17, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress.

Features for this release are tracked on the feature list page.

The Purpose of the Alpha Release
This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle). The software has bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.

You have an important part to play in this release. Either install or run a Fedora Live instance of the Fedora 17 Alpha release, then try using a few applications or activities that are important to you. If it doesn't work, file a bug. This release gives the wider community a set of code to test against as a very important step in the process of making a solid Fedora 17 release. You can make the Fedora 17 release better by testing this release and reporting your findings.

What's New in Fedora 17 Alpha
Beefy Miracle, as expected, is a beefy release, loaded with tasty new features to delight the palate of the most finicky diners.

Of course, we have the latest in GNOME and KDE Desktops. The Miracle includes GNOME 3.4 and KDE 4.8. There is also a rendering improvement to let more users, even those with older hardware, enjoy the GNOME shell goodness. The Beefy Miracle plays well with sweet things, too; the release includes an updated Sugar desktop and multitouch support.

Beefy Miracle flies high above the clouds with OpenStack and additional cloudy features including Eucalyptus, CloudStack and Open Nebula.

End users will see support for ICC profiles for color printing, a new and greatly improved gimp, and more consistent and sensible password checking.

Virtualization features continue to ramp up, a new virtual storage architecture, a virtualization sandbox, performance monitoring for guest, and a new live blockcopy feature.

To be beefy, all systems tools into /usr which reduce files spread, confusion about overall file system layout and improve compatibility. With that in the belly, it is possible to snapshot /usr and do an upgrade safely and quietly, in addition of ability to share and mount /usr read-only. About security, firewalld introduced [at Lovelock|in Fedora 15], will be now default firewall solution. Dynamic firewall rules management by a daemon, and an additional feature with Network Zone to classify network connections according to their trust level.

And for developers, well, the features just won't quit. The Opa language is new to Fedora, and gcc, D, PHP, Java, Ruby, Haskell and Erlang all see updates in the Beefy Miracle. Additional developer condiments include an update of Eclipse to Juno, DIET middleware for grid computing, an updated JBoss application server, improved dependency checking for KDE, and so much more.

How to Try Alpha
This release is accompanied by installable live media of both the GNOME and KDE desktops. With live media users can perform testing and demonstration without installing any software to the hard disk. As this release is largely targeted at developers and contains many bleeding edge packages, this is the best method for less experienced users who want to get involved with testing. The Live media also have an option to install Fedora to an hard disk for the more intrepid users.

The best way to download this release is through BitTorrent -- visit the Fedora torrent server for a listing of available images. Release images can also be downloaded from any of our mirrors. Remember that live images can be used on USB media via the livecd-iso-to-disk utility available in the livecd-tools package on existing Fedora systems. Refer to the USB How-to for more instructions.

Verify Fedora
Fedora does not publish MD5 or SHA1 hashes to verify images since they are not secure enough. Instead we have been using SHA256 since Fedora 11. In Linux, you can use sha256sum command (part of coreutils and installed by default) to verify the Fedora image:

sha256sum -c *-CHECKSUM

Windows users can use the free to download utility HashCalc.

Mac OS X users can use the free to download utility hashtab.

Fedora GPG signatures can be verified following the instructions here.

Debugging Information And Performance
Fedora kernels have many extensive debugging options during the developmental cycle that have a negative impact on performance but provide developers with more information automatically, in the case of bug reports. If you are running performance analysis on Rawhide or test releases such as Alpha or Beta, make sure you take this into account.

Fedora 17 Release Schedule And Feature Details
Development continues on Rawhide during and after this release, leading to the beta, then the final release. The links below provide the release schedule for both the pre-releases and the final release, as well as the wiki's pages for tracking the various features planned for inclusion in Fedora 17.


 * Feature List
 * Schedule