F26 Beta release announcement

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 26 Beta, the next big step on our journey to the exciting Fedora 26 release in June.

Official release here: [ADD LINK]

Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site:

• Get Fedora 26 Beta Workstation
• Get Fedora 26 Beta Server

Looking for Cloud edition? Check out the section on Fedora Atomic below. Or, check out one of our popular variants:

• Get Fedora 26 Beta Spins
• Get Fedora 26 Beta Labs
• Get Fedora 26 Beta ARM

Fedora’s journey is not simply about updating one operating system with the latest and greatest packages. It’s also about innovation for the many different platforms represented in the Fedora Project: Workstation, Server, Atomic, and the various Spins. Coordinating the efforts across the many working groups is no small task, and serves as a testament to the talent and professionalism found within the Fedora community.

As we move into this Beta phase of the Fedora 26 release cycle, what can users expect?

Fedora-Wide Changes

Some of the changes that will be seen across all aspects of Fedora include:

• gcc 7
• golang 1.8
• New security hardening
• blivit-gui for disk management

Fedora Workstation

The Workstation edition of Fedora 26 Beta features GNOME 3.24 and includes:

• Night Light, which uses the Natural Light feature in GNOME to change the color temperature of user displays based on time of day.
• LibreOffice 5.3, the latest update to the popular open source office productivity suite that provides several new capabilities across LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Calc and LibreOffice Impress.
• Updates to Fedora Media Writer that allow users to create bootable SD cards with Fedora for ARM-based devices,like Raspberry Pi and also notifies users when new Fedora releases are available and ready for updating.

Fedora Server

Fedora 26 Server is also going to see some interesting changes in this cycle:

Fedora Atomic

• Containerized Kubernetes as an alternative to built-in Kubernetes binaries, enabling users to more easily run different versions of the container orchestration engine.
• The latest version of rpm-ostree which includes support for direct rpm install, a reload command and a clean-up command.
• System Containers, a way of installing system infrastructure software, like networking or Kubernetes, on Fedora Atomic Host in a container.
• Updated versions of Docker, atomic and Cockpit for enhanced container building, system support and workload monitoring.

Spins and More

LXQt

We are really excited to announce this new spin. LXQt is a lightweight Desktop Environment based in Qt Libraries and is here in Fedora now! It includes:

• LXQt version 0.11.x where x is not common for all components as there were bugfix releases for some of them.
• Qt5 only packages: with similar theming for gtk apps (breeze theme).
• Essential apps: Include only essential apps by default to improve user experience after installation (avoiding to clean up useless stuffs), reducing the size of the image and reducing the footprint on disk
• dnfdragora for graphical package management: This is a shining new feature, because dnfdragora will hit F27, but for LXQt Spin, there will not be yumex-dnf.
• Openbox window manager but with possibility to switch to Kwin for nice graphical effects.

Cinnamon

• Cinnamon Desktop: Version 3.4
• Theme: A new default theme, arc-dark.
• Slick-Greeter: Slick-Greeter is now used as the LightDM login greeter, providing HiDPI support and better visual integration with Cinnamon.
• dnfdragora: dnfdragora is now used instead of yumex-dnf for graphical package management.
• Blueberry: Blueberry is now the bluetooth widget.
• MP3 support: MP3 playback support for gstreamer applications is now included.

Design Suite

• Gnome Books:A e-books manager application for GNOME
• Gnome ToDo: Personal task manager for GNOME
• Inkscape: Updated to version 0.92. SVG format now complies to W3C standard meaning saved files handles 96dpi.

Python Classroom

The new lab, part of the initiative Fedora Love Python, is shipped with Python development tools for teaching Python or Python related topics. It includes:

• Python 3.6 including the python3-devel package
• Python 2.7 including the python2-devel package
• PyPy 3
• tox
• virtualenv
• IPython console for both Python 2 and 3
• Jupyter Notebook with Python 2 and 3 kernels (if this gets into Fedora in time)
• Offline documentation for Python 2 and 3
• Basic toolchain for building C and C++ extensions and valgrind
• git
• nano, vim, ssh client, curl, wget
• Develelopment packages for commonly used dependencies of packages on the Python Package Index like:
  • libxml2-devel
  • libyaml-devel

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 26 is expected in June. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Every bug you find and report doesn’t just help you, it improves the experience of millions of Fedora users worldwide! Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can, and your feedback improves not only Fedora, but Linux and Free software as a whole.

Issues and Details

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in #fedora-qa on Freenode. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F26 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug report.

---