F15 Beta announcement

The clock is ticking. The days are counting down. The release of Fedora 15, codenamed "Lovelock," is scheduled for release in late May. Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to users worldwide, with a new release every six months.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 15.

"I beta one American dollar that you will love this release!"

Come see why we love Fedora so much. We are betting you will, too. Download it now:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease?anF15b

What is the Beta Release?
The beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 15. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 15 in May. We invite you to join us in making Fedora 15 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 F15 bugs page.

If you find a bug that's not found on that page, be sure it gets fixed before release by reporting your discovery at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/. Thank you!

Features
Desktop enthusiasts and end users of all sorts can look forward to:


 * Gnome Shell and the Gnome 3 desktop. Gnome 3 is the next major version of the Gnome desktop. After many years of a largely unchanged Gnome 2.x experience, GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with GNOME Shell.
 * LibreOffice Productivity Suite. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, with the support of the OpenOffice.org community.  All of the applications you know and love are still there, including apps for spreadsheets, document creation, and presentations.
 * Desktop environments a-plenty. The Xfce and LXDE spins have been updated, and the Fedora Spins SIG has other offerings tailored to a wide variety of user needs.

Sysadmins will love features such as:
 * Appliance building. BoxGrinder creates appliances (virtual machines) from simple plain text appliance definition files for various virtual platforms, and is great for building appliances for use in a Cloud environment.
 * Dynamic Firewall. The dynamic firewall mode aims to make it possible to change firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and to make persistent connections possible.

Coders have lots of new development tools to try out, including:
 * Updates to popular languages. Python 3.2, Rails 3.0.3, and OCaml 3.12 are all included in Fedora 15.
 * Project tooling. Maven 3 is a Java project management, project comprehension, and build system tool.
 * Compiling and debugging. GDB gets an update to 7.3, and GCC 4.6 is included. (Fedora 15 has also been rebuilt using GCC 4.6!)

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all the new features in Fedora 15 is available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/

Contributing
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!