Fedora 12 Alpha Announcement

Fedora 12 "Contantine" is available! When Fedora 10 and 11 were released, users and press alike gushed: "Slick and stable... has a rock solid feel." "Fast and easy." "A great release." What's next for the free operating system that shows off the best new technology of tomorrow? You can find out at:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

For this release, we slightly changed the way Fedora is distributed to the public. Instead of releasing an Alpha, Beta, Preview Release and Final version, we will only provide Alpha, Beta and Final versions for Fedora 12. Alpha in Fedora now means essentially the same as industry-wide, in our case "feature-complete and testable". That means that Alpha is publicly testable, not by just an anointed few. Beta now means "code-complete and as bug-free as possible" and it should be as close to a final release as humanly possible.

To achieve that goal, we also hope to repeat the crazy success of Fedora 11's Beta contest! Test five things in the Alpha that are important to you as a user. If you find a bug *and* report it, you get the free attention of a package maintainer on a problem personally important to you! Do your part to make Fedora 11 that much better.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/

Among the top features of this ground-breaking release:

• Faster and Smoother Graphical Startup - Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) is now enabled by default on Nvidia systems as well through the Nouveau driver. Fedora 10 originally included support for KMS but only for some ATI display cards. In Fedora 11, this was extended to Intel cards as well. This release has extended it further to support Nvidia cards as well. As as result of this improvement, you will get a faster and smoother graphical boot on (nearly) all systems via the Plymouth graphical boot system developed within Fedora.
• Better webcam support - Started in Fedora 10, adding out of the box support for a lot of new webcams has been extended in Fedora 12.
• Better Display Port support - Many new graphic cards have a Display Port nowadays, Fedora 12 adds a better support for them in X and kernel drivers.
• Empathy as default IM client - Empathy is an instant messenger client better integrated in Gnome which is going to replace Pidgin.
• Gnome 2.28 and KDE 4.3 - This Alpha release has the latest code from the two main desktop environments.
• Network Manager Mobile Broadband - By providing a database of preconfigured mobile broadband providers, supporting more hardware and permit to scan GSM networks, NetworkManager will make the use of mobile broadband much easier.

But wait, there's more! For developers there are all sorts of goodies:

• Blah - Blah.

Peek under the hood and there is still more:

• NetworkManager full IPv6 support - NetworkManager has been extended to fully support IPv6 configurations through the GUI.
• Better power management - NetworkManager has been extended to fully support IPv6 configurations through the GUI.

And that is only the beginning. A more complete list and details of each new cited feature is available:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList

For release information, including common and known bugs, please refer to the release notes:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_12_Alpha_release_notes