F17 Alpha release announcement

Hot dog! The Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" Alpha Release is available! This release offers a preview of some of the best and meatiest free and open source technology currently under development. Relish in a glimpse of the future:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

What is the Alpha release?
The Alpha release contains all the bunderful features of Fedora 17 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete, and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 17 is due in early May.

Frankly, we think Fedora 17 will be the best release ever, but we know we can't do it without your help. Please take a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it -- every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora a franktastic, rock-solid distribution. (Read down to the end of the announcement for more information on how to help.)

Condiments
When we said Beefy, we weren't kidding: an a-bun-dance of condiments, err, features, are available to help you feed your hunger for the best in free and open source software. We take pride in our toppings, and in our fine ingredients; Fedora 17 includes both over- and under-the-bun improvements that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free (range) software.

Check out our menu, certain to please a variety of appetites:

End Users
End users will see numerous improvements in Fedora 17.


 * GIMP has been updated to the long awaited 2.8 release, with an a-bun-dant list of new features, such as the single window mode, layer groups, and on-canvas text editing.
 * Improved language and font support: A number of Lohit fonts, enabling Indian script, have been added, as well as support for Inscript 2 for keymapping; libpinyin increases pinyin input speed by adding predictive intelligence.
 * Desktops galore! Whether you like your bun covered in GNOME, KDE, Sugar, or otherwise, we've updated it to the sauciest, tastiest version available.

Systems Administrators
Serving up hot dogs all day long? Increase your reliability and versatility with the new enhancements to the clustering stack in Fedora 17. Load balancing and high availability improvements have been made, allowing systems administrators to deploy Fedora in environments requiring greater availability and clustered file systems; both Corosync 2.0 and the Pacemaker Cluster Resource Manager 1.1.7 are included. JBoss Application Server (AS) 7 has also been added to Fedora 17; this fast, lightweight, and modular application server allows you to run full Java EE applications.

Developers
Developers can cook up fresh code with the updates and additions of numerous languages in Fedora 17. Java 7, Ruby 1.9.3, and PHP 5.4 are just some of the latest-and-greatest; we've also got updates and additions in the Haskell platform, Erlang, and D, as well as the addition of the Opa programming language. GCC has been updated to 4.7, and Fedora 17 has additionally been rebuilt with this new version, resulting in compiled code improvements.

Virtualization
A a-bun-dance of virtualization features are ready for consumption in Fedora 17:


 * Open vSwitch is a flexible, multi-layer software switch typically used in virtualization environments as the network switching component in the hypervisor, providing virtual machines their network connectivity.
 * KVM improvements, including the addition of a virtualized PMU (performance monitoring unit)for guests, and a live block copy features, allowing an image backing a guest disk to be copied while the guest is online.
 * Virtualization sandboxing provides a new application development library (libvirt-sandbox) to facilitate the embedding of virtualization.

Hot Dogs as a Service (HDaaS)
Kidding! We couldn't resist jumping into the game with our own acronym. Seriously, though, we have a frank-tastic variety of cloud technologies coming in Fedora 17, including the additions of some of the best IaaS platforms in free and open source software -- Cloudstack, Eucalyptus, and OpenNebula. OpenStack gets bumped in Fedora 17 to the Essex release, and other OpenStack features have been added or updated as well, including Horizon and Quantum, and the ability to use OpenStack with libguestfs and qpid.

These and many other improvements provide a wide and solid base for future Fedora releases. This release increases the range of possibilities for developers and helps Fedora to maintain its position at the leading edge of free and open source technology.

Ketchup with the full list of features for Fedora 17 here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/FeatureList

We also have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

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

Issues and Details
For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_17_Alpha_release_notes

A shorter list of common bugs can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F17_bugs

Contributing
Ever wonder how sausage is made? Yeah, we didn't want to know either. Hot dogs, on the other hand, are glorious creations, and the Alpha release of Beefy Miracle is yet another fine example of a long line of solid Alpha releases. We can't do it without you, though. Bug reports are especially helpful as we move from the hot dog factory to the finished Beefy Miracle. If you encounter any issues, please report them!

Mustard up the confidence to contribute? Don't worry -- we don't bite! (Except... tasty, delicious hot dogs. Mmmmmm. Hot dogs.) Fedora is a fantastic, friendly community, and we have many ways in which you can contribute, including Documentation, Marketing, Design, QA, Development, and more.

To learn how to help us cook a better hot dog, visit: http://join.fedoraproject.org/

Thank you, and we hope to see you in the Fedora project!