Fedora 12 one page release notes



Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that brings the latest in free and open source software to your desktop, laptop and server. Fedora is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. You can read more information about the Fedora Project on our Overview page.

Fedora is free to use, modify, and distribute, and includes software that helps you work, play, organize, and socialize.



What's new in Fedora 12?
Fedora 12 (Constantine) is filled with improvements that make Linux better than ever for all types of users. Here are a few of the new things you can expect to see when you try out Fedora 12.

System Administrators


Fedora 12 gives you the future first. The technologies that make open source the platform of choice for savvy system administrators are all here. Fast, stable, secure, and ready for you to work your magic.

A number of improvements are included in Fedora 12 to make your life easier. A new initial ramdisk setup tool called Dracut helps keep boot time as low as possible. There's now ext4 support for GRUB, and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) is enabled by default on systems with NVIDIA, ATI and Intel video cards for a faster and smoother graphical boot.

For those who use Samba, the addition of GFS2 Clustered Samba and improvements in HA (high availability) clustering makes sharing data across machines easier and more reliable. Fedora 12 also features constant security updates for bulletproof systems, and a number of virtualization improvements have emerged with this release that use memory more efficiently, provide more flexible hardware and network solutions, and boost the performance of virtual guest disk images. You can even create scripts to perform complex tasks directly on guest disk images. Fedora 12 helps you unite all the diverse cultures of your virtual guests into a single functional system.

Developers
For developers, Fedora 12 includes a rich set of development tools, including all popular programming languages, IDEs, and an extensive set of libraries. The most recent versions of emacs, mercurial, and php are included - no need to worry about downloading the latest and greatest, we've got them all. And for developers using Eclipse, version 3.5.1 (Galileo) is included in Fedora 12, along with more Eclipse plug-ins than ever before. And these features are all in addition to the world's most popular web, SQL and application servers, creating a complete development and production environment in one easy to use platform.



How to get started
Intrigued? Want to give Fedora 12 a try?

You can download a LiveCD regardless of what operating system you're running. This will give you a working version of Fedora, complete with common applications, all running off your CD drive - your hard drive won't be touched at all. And when you're ready, installation is just a click away.

And if you're running Fedora 11, upgrading is easy. Refer to our handy documentation for help.

Five Fun Things in Fedora 12 Video


In fifteen minutes, learn 5 fun things you can do with Fedora 12!


 * Part 1 (9 minutes)
 * Part 2 (6 minutes)

'''Unity hands photo credit: soccer practice by woodleywonderworks on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.