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Fedora Project Launches Fedora 18Jan 18, 2013 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announced the availability of Fedora 18, the latest version of its free, open source operating system distribution. According to a release, the Fedora Project community is dedicated to the development and advancement of open source technologies, which culminate in a new release of Fedora approximately twice each year. Fedora 18 combines open source features, a streamlined installation experience and technological enhancements into an operating system that can be used by anyone. Notable Fedora 18 advancements, as described by the Company, include: -User features: The user interface for Fedora's installation procedure, part of Anaconda, has been completely re-written, and provides significant improvements to the installation experience. Designed to be simple and understandable for a traditional desktop user, yet with options available for more complex installations, the new installation experience shines with a clean, modern look. The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to the 3.6 release, introducing new enhancements to the message tray and notifications, revisions to the Activities Overview and accessibility support. KDE Plasma Workspaces has been updated as well, with the 4.9 version delivering improvements in stability and performance, and many new features. Additionally, the MATE and Cinnamon desktops are new desktop options in Fedora 18. -Developer features: Fedora 18 includes several language and programming environment updates, with fresh versions of Python, Rails, D and Perl. Clojure tooling packages and libraries have also been added in this release. Finally, SystemTap has been updated to the 2.0 release, extending its capabilities for instrumenting code and other diagnostic capabilities, and providing those abilities to a greater pool of user access levels. -System administrator features: The recently released Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols, further enhancing its long-standing use for file and print sharing in heterogeneous server environments. Fedora 18 also includes multiple enhancements to storage management with new tools and libraries for storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) management, and the addition of System Storage Manager, a unified command-line interface for managing multiple storage technologies. oVirt Engine, the management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, brings in new features with its 3.1 release, and Eucalyptus, a platform for on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, makes its debut in Fedora 18 with its 3.2 release. Finally, Fedora continues to offer fresh releases of OpenStack, bringing in the Folsom release; Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is newly available in Fedora, enabling via API the orchestration of cloud applications using file- or web-based templates. The Fedora Project is a global partnership of free software community members. Red Hat is a provider of open source software solutions. More information: www.redhat.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) |