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* '''systemd'''  systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.  Thanks to Lennart Poettering and Rahul Sundaram from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in this release.  
* '''systemd'''  systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.  Thanks to Lennart Poettering and Rahul Sundaram from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in this release.  


* '''BoxGrinder'''  BoxGrinder is a set of free and open source tools used for building appliances (virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances (images/virtual machines) from simple plain text Appliance Definition Files.  Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for bringing this feature into Fedora.  
* '''BoxGrinder'''  BoxGrinder is a set of free and open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances from simple plain text Appliance Definition Files.  Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for bringing this feature into Fedora.  


* '''Spice integration in Virt Manager'''  With Fedora 15, virt-manager has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop. It's now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, and benefiting all the Spice enhancements easily directly from virt-manager.  It provides better performance and additional functionality over using VNC.  Thanks to the spice-gtk library, new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings.  Thanks to Marc-André Lureau,  Red Hat developer for leading development of this feature.  
* '''Spice integration in Virt Manager'''  With Fedora 15, virt-manager has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop. It's now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, and benefiting all the Spice enhancements easily directly from virt-manager.  It provides better performance and additional functionality over using VNC.  Thanks to the spice-gtk library, new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings.  Thanks to Marc-André Lureau,  Red Hat developer for leading development of this feature.  

Revision as of 19:29, 18 May 2011

Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 15! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, developers, virtualization and system administration.

What's New in Fedora 15?

For desktop users

A universe of new features for end users:

  • GNOME 3 Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers and GNOME 3 is well integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3 is polished, robust and extensible and Fedora includes several GNOME Shell Extensions and GNOME Tweak Tool in the repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team developers and community volunteers.
  • Dynamic Firewall Fedora 15 includes a dynamic firewall background service called firewalld that is powerful and can maintain persistent connections while simultaneously offering the flexibility to change firewall settings without restarting the firewall. It also has a D-BUS interface to interact with clients or services, that request firewall changes. firewall-cmd is a user space alternative to iptables command. Thanks to Thomas Woerner from Red Hat for developing this feature.
  • Robotics Suite Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a collection of packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments, utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into an easy-to-install package group. Refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Robotics for more details. Thanks to Tim Niemueller and Rich Mattes, Fedora community volunteers for their participation.
  • Indic Typing Booster Indic Typing Booster is a predictive input method for ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input. One can then simply select word from suggestion list and improve typing speed with more accuracy and convenience. Thanks to the development lead by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team engineers in Pune, India.
  • Better crash reporting ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora, now allows to prepare a part of crash processing remotely, on a server by Fedora Project. Remote coredump retracing avoid users having to download a large amount of debug information and leads to better quality of reports. Retrace server can generate good backtraces with much higher success rate than local retracing.
  • Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter SELinux troubleshooter is a graphical tool that watches and analyses log files and provides solutions automatically to common issues. In this release, this tool has been redesigned to be more simple but provide more solutions at the same time. Thanks to Dan Walsh, SELinux developer at Red Hat for leading the development of this functionality.
  • LibreOffice LibreOffice is community-driven and developed, free and open source personal productivity suite which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. It is a fork of Openoffice.org with a diverse community of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many volunteers. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream participation and maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.
  • KDE 4.6 and Xfce 4.8 Fedora 15 includes new major versions of these alternative desktop environments. Thanks to Red Hat developers and community volunteers, part of KDE and Xfce special interest groups. Fedora also provides dedicated KDE and Xfce installable live images that includes these desktop environments by default.
  • Sugar .92 Sugar is a desktop environment originally designed for OLPC and now evolved into a learning platform developed by the non-profit Sugar Labs foundation. This version provides major usability improvements for the first login screen and the control panel, as well as new features such as support for 3G networks. Thanks to Peter Robinson and Sebastian Dziallas, Fedora community volunteers for leading the integration of this environment.

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

GCC 4.6 GCC 4.6 is the system default compiler in Fedora 15 and all the relevant packages have been rebuild in Fedora 15 using it. Developers can realize compiled code improvements and use the newly added features, such as improved C++0x support, support for the Go language, REAL*16 support in Fortran and many other improvements. Thanks to Jakub Jelinek from Red Hat for leading the integration.

GDB 7.3 This new GDB release 7.3 together with Archer and Fedora extensions improves debugging experience on Fedora by making the debugger more powerful. The majority of these features were written by Red Hat engineers, thus benefiting all gdb users. New features for the Fedora 15 release include support for breakpoints at SystemTap markers (probes), support for using labels in the program's source, OpenCL language debugging support, thread debugging of core dumps and Python scripting improvements. Numerous important packages within Fedora are pre-built with SystemTap static markers, and these can now be used as the target for breakpoints in gdb. Thanks to Jan Kratochvil and other GDB developers from Red Hat for their upstream participation and integration of this functionality.

Programming language updates Python 3.2: The system Python 3 stack has been upgraded to 3.2 (the system Python 2 stack remains at 2.7), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes see http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html. OCaml 3.12: OCaml 3.12 is a major revision of the OCaml programming language, the camlp4 macro language, libraries, and CDuce for XML processing. Rails 3.0.5: Rails 3 is a large update to the Ruby on Rails web framework. It brings many new features such as a polished routing API, new activemailer and activerecord APIs, and many more new enhancements. Thanks to Dave Malcolm, Richard W.M. Jones and Mo Morsi, Red Hat developers leading the integration of the respective features in this release.

Maven 3 Maven 3.0 should offer better stability and performance compared to previous versions and a lot of work is under the hood to simplify writing Maven plugins and further improve performance by building projects in parallel. Refer to http://maven.apache.org/docs/3.0/release-notes.html for more information. Fedora still provides maven2 package to support backward compatibility where needed. Thanks to Red Hat developer, Stanislav Ochotnický for this work in this feature.

For system administrators

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

  • systemd systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. Thanks to Lennart Poettering and Rahul Sundaram from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in this release.
  • BoxGrinder BoxGrinder is a set of free and open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances from simple plain text Appliance Definition Files. Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for bringing this feature into Fedora.
  • Spice integration in Virt Manager With Fedora 15, virt-manager has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop. It's now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, and benefiting all the Spice enhancements easily directly from virt-manager. It provides better performance and additional functionality over using VNC. Thanks to the spice-gtk library, new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings. Thanks to Marc-André Lureau, Red Hat developer for leading development of this feature.
  • Consistent Network Device Naming Servers often have multiple Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX. By changing the naming convention, system administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into some "sane" order. This feature is enabled on all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later. Thanks to Jordan Hargrave, Matt Domsch and several other engineers from Dell for their long term upstream participation and integration of this feature.
  • RPM 4.9.0 RPM 4.9.0 brings a number of immediate benefits to Fedora including pluggable dependency generator, built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements and many bugfixes. More details at at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0, Thanks to Panu Matilainen from Red Hat and other RPM developers for their participation and help in integration this feature in Fedora 15.
  • Setuid removal Fedora 15 removes setuid in many applications and instead specifically assigns the capabilities required by each application to improve security by reducing the impact of any potential vulnerabilities in these applications. Thanks to Daniel Walsh from Red Hat for leading the integration of this feature.
  • Improved support for encrypted home directory Fedora 15 brings in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory when a user logs in. Thanks to Paolo Bonzini from Red Hat for integration of this feature.
  • Tryton ERP system Tryton is a three-tiers general-purpose application platform and basis for an ERP system. Thanks to Dan Horák, Fedora community volunteer for integration of this feature.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of all the new features on board Fedora 15 is available at:

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

OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading

For an quick tour of features in Fedora 15 and pictures of many friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_one_page_release_notes

Fedora 15 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

Fedora 15 common bugs are documented at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs

Fedora Spins

Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. These include ones providing alternative desktop environments like Xfce and LXDE but also more specialized ones like Fedora Security Lab, Fedora Electronics Lab and Fedora Design Suite. More information on these spins and much more is available at

http://spins.fedoraproject.org

Contributing

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://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, design and do artwork, 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!

Fedora 16

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 15 experience, our next release, Fedora 16, is already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early schedule for an end of Oct 2011 release:

Features under consideration for Fedora 16 include Btrfs and GRUB 2 by default, further enhancements to systemd and much much more. Join us today and help improve free and open source software and lead the future of Linux.

Contact information

If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press