Fedora 16

Fedora
The next genaration Linux distribution from Red Hat
Fedora is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent.
Fedora has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images, and is available for both x86-64 and i386 and also PPC machines.
The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.
The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule.
The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux.
By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· For desktop users: a journey to the center of the desktop...
GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment, brings new features, including:
· System Settings gains an "Online Accounts" panel, which provides a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.
· A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy, Evolution and the new "Online Accounts" settings panel
· A new document management application provides a simpler alternative to traditional file management for both local and "in-cloud" documents.
KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop environment, brings substantial updates, including:
· DigiKam 2.0 adds face detection and recognition, geotagging and more.
· An updated Plasma Workspaces window manager (KWin) makes KDE better suited for mobile devices, and also adds improvements for desktop users.
· A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating systems to select the OS to boot next.
· For developers: Twenty thousand lines in C...
· Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including Unicode 6.0 support.
· GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing with the C internals of GCC.
· D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.
· For system administrators: around the world in eighty columns...
· GRUB2: This leap forward allows better configuration options and better support for non-x86 architectures.
· New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000, providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.
· Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.
· ext4 driver mounts ext2 and ext3: Fedora 16 uses the ext4 driver to mount ext2 and ext3 file systems, reducing the size of the kernel code.
Improved virtualization tools:
· Fedora 16 provides improvements to virtual networking, making large deployments easier.
· Virt-manager guest inspection is a unique-to-Fedora tool allowing read-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry.
· Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.
Cloud goodies galore:
· Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.
· OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
· Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high availability for cloud environments.
· HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.