Fedora 14 goes gold

When it comes to Linux distributions one of the best of them is Fedora, the community version of Linux giant Red Hat. Following close on the heels of the release of Ubuntu 10.10 last month, Fedora developers last night released version 14 of the operating system.

Codenamed Laughlin, Fedora 14 isn’t packed with desktop changes but for developers and the geekier users, the release is full of useful features. This is very much in line with Fedora’s habit of rolling bleeding-edge features into their releases, often well ahead of other mainstream Linux releases.

On the desktop Fedora 14 includes Gnome 2.32 as the desktop interface. This is not the full-blown Gnome 3.0 interface that most users have been waiting for but does include some under-the-hood changes in preparation for that in the near future. Gnome developers are currently working on the next release of the desktop environment which will include an entirely new shell which radically changes the way that users manage applications and files on the desktop.

Development of Gnome 3.0, however, has been pretty slow and the release date has been pushed back more than once. Some Linux makers, including Ubuntu, are starting to get frustrated with the delays and are opting to use alternative desktop environments in their releases.

For users not that keen on the Gnome desktop, Fedora 14 also includes the KDE 4.5 desktop which was released in August.

For developers there are a number of goodies included in Fedora 14. Among those are a new compiler for the D programming language, Python 2.7 as default and Python 3 as an optional extra. Also for developers Fedora includes Netbeans 6.9 and the newest Eclipse release.

Virtualisation is still a major feature of Fedora 14. Along with KVM, Red Hat’s preferred virtualisation software, Fedora 14 also includes Spice, a tool for seamless interaction with multiple virtual desktops.

Fedora also makes a big cloud computing play with this release. Fedora 14 is the first release of the distribution that not only includes a range of virtualisation and cloud tools but also features a concurrent release for Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

Fedora 14 runs on most popular platforms, including Intel and AMD 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Fedora 14 can be downloaded from the Fedora website. Fedora 14 is also pretty lightweight so will also run neatly on smaller netbooks.

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