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Fedora 15, a new version of one of the leading and most widely used Linux distributions on the market, has been released. Some of the many new features include support for Btrfs file system, Indic typing booster, redesigned SELinux troubleshooter, better power management, LibreOffice productivity suite, and, of course, the brand-new GNOME 3 desktop: "GNOME 3 is the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15.
What's new in Fedora 15 (Lovelock)?
For desktop users
A universe of new features for end users:
GNOME 3 desktop environment GNOME 3 is the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available in the Fedora software repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team developers and community volunteers.
Btrfs filesystem Btrfs, the next generation filesystem is being developed with upstream participation of Red Hat developers, Oracle and many others. Btrfs is now available as a menu item in the installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4) and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem in the next release of Fedora. The btrfsck program for performing filesystem checks is under active development upstream with participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!). Thanks to Josef Bacik, Red Hat Btrfs developer, for his upstream participation and integration of this feature in Fedora including a yum plugin (yum-plugin-fs-snapshot) that enables users to rollback updates if necessary, taking advantage of Btrfs snapshots.
Indic typing booster Indic typing booster is a predictive input method for the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input, and users can simply select a word from the suggestion list and improve their typing speed and accuracy. Thanks to the development led by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team engineers in Pune, India.
Better crash reporting ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora, can now perform a part of crash processing remotely, on a Fedora Project server. Remote coredump retracing avoids users having to download a large amount of debug information and leads to better quality reports. The retrace server can generate good backtraces with a much higher success rate than local retracing.
Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter SELinux troubleshooter is a graphical tool that watches and analyses log files and automatically provides solutions to common issues. In this release, this tool has been redesigned to be simpler but provide more solutions at the same time. Thanks to Dan Walsh, SELinux developer at Red Hat, for leading the development of this functionality.
Higher compression in live images Live images in this release use XZ compression instead of gzip as in older releases, making them smaller (about 10%) to download or providing more space for applications to be made available by default. Thanks to Bruno Wolff III, Fedora community volunteer, for integrating this functionality in Fedora Live CD tools. Thanks to Phillip Lougher for his work on squashfs and Lasse Collin for getting XZ squashfs support in the upstream Linux kernel.
Better power management Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes, improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency. Thanks to Jaroslav Škarvada, Red Hat developer, for integrating the newer powertop and pm-utils, as well as performing power measurement and benchmarking. Thanks to Jan Včelák, Red Hat developer, for developing tuned and integrating the newer version in this release.
LibreOffice productivity suite LibreOffice is a 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. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this release. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream participation and for maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.
Firefox 4 web browser A new major version of this popular browser from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release. Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync, native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format, HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface. Thanks to Christopher Aillon from Red Hat and others for integrating Firefox 4 in this release.
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burn iso to cd/dvd
boot from cd/dvd drive
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