Fedora 10 sparkles
| Alastair Otter | November 26, 2008 | No comments |
Alastair Otter
Alastair Otter is a senior journalist at MyBroadband, and focuses on software and hardware. He has a particular love for Open Source Software (OSS)...
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Better networking and a completely new graphical boot process top the list of features in Fedora Linux 10.
The Fedora Linux project has released Fedora 10, six months after the release of Fedora 9.
The new release, codenamed Cambridge, has a number of new features and improvements including better networking control and the latest developments from the Gnome and KDE projects. It also has built-in virtualisation and better package management.
One of the areas that will be noticeable for its changes will be the much-improved network management tool which has had a few additional tweaks. One of the cooler of these is the new "instant on" collaboration. Essentially this means that a Fedora machine with an Internet connection can easily share this connection with other computer users in the same area. It’s a great feature for short-term networking.
Also included this time around by default is the KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) hypervisor. KVM is an interesting inclusion as KVM is already part of the Linux Kernel tree, unlike other virtualisation technologies such as Xen.
On the desktop interface side, Fedora includes both Gnome 2.24.1 as well as KDE 4.1 and the various additions that those bring.
Also, unlike Ubuntu, which decided to leave OpenOffice.org 3.0 out of its 8.10 release at the end of last month, Fedora 10 includes the latest version of the office suite. The decision by Ubuntu was made because of OpenOffice.org 3.0 being released late and too close to the release of 8.10. It wasn’t a popular decision among users, however.
Fedora, on the other hand, has had time to integrate OpenOffice.org into its latest release.
Networking and desktop apps aside, the objective of most Linux distributions at this time is to reduce boot times as much as possible. Fedora’s approach is Plymouth which is a completely new graphical boot sequence. The idea is that Plymouth starts earlier than previous boot systems did – even before the root system is mounted – and doesn’t require n X server to run. Hopefully this will give the boot process a noticeable boost.
Package management is also improved in this release of Fedora, in specific through the use of PackageKit which debuted in Fedora 9. The latest release of the software has been enhanced to assist users in finding additional software they may need. For example, if specific codecs are required to play a media file, PackageKit ought to be able to assist and find the necessary files.
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