Fedora 16 (Verne) is Coming With Lots of Big Changes
Fedora 16 is code-named Verne, for Jules Verne is coming with big changes. The beta version was released on the october. Fedora is both a great testbed for new technologies, and a good distro with a strong commitment to free (as in freedom) software. Fedora was the first, or among the first to roll outSELinux, a free Java environment (GNU Java, OpenJDK, and ecj) back before Sun's Java was converted to the GPL, PulseAudio, and Nouveau.
Fedora's QA Community Monkey, explains:-
"Fedora isn't only a test bed, it is a perfectly usable distro as a daily driver. It is going to be slightly less dependable and polished than Ubuntu for such use, in general. Everyone has a slightly different take on Fedora but I like to see it as being kind of a prototype, or maybe a first-year model; it's not exactly that we're not trying to build an awesome usable desktop / server distro, but we tend to introduce a lot of very Shiny New Stuff and do it on a very aggressive schedule. And of course we don't provide any non-free drivers or worry overmuch about making sure they work, which can be a consideration. I run the next-stable-version on my desktop most of the time and it's totally workable, and I run my servers on current-stable-Fedora. But there may be the odd occasion where something breaks, and version upgrades can be a bit bumpy."
F16 introduces a number of significant changes: GRUB 2 replaces legacy GRUB, HAL is gone and replaced by udisks, upower, and libudev, migration from SysV init to native Systemd continues(scheduled for completion in F17), and a number of cloud utilities and OpenStack are included. btrfs, the much-hyped filesystem that is supposed to become the Linux default, was supposed to be the default for Verne, but it's still not ready. The main snag is the lack of a dependable, fully-functional fsck, so look for it in F17. You can still use it if you like because it is an option in the installer when you set up partitions. And, as Adam Williamson revealed, "btrfs has been available as a Sekrit Option in the installer for several releases, you make it available by passing a kernel parameter to the installer. For a while this was, awesomely, 'icantbelieveitsnotbtr', but now it's just plain 'btrfs'."
"Fedora isn't only a test bed, it is a perfectly usable distro as a daily driver. It is going to be slightly less dependable and polished than Ubuntu for such use, in general. Everyone has a slightly different take on Fedora but I like to see it as being kind of a prototype, or maybe a first-year model; it's not exactly that we're not trying to build an awesome usable desktop / server distro, but we tend to introduce a lot of very Shiny New Stuff and do it on a very aggressive schedule. And of course we don't provide any non-free drivers or worry overmuch about making sure they work, which can be a consideration. I run the next-stable-version on my desktop most of the time and it's totally workable, and I run my servers on current-stable-Fedora. But there may be the odd occasion where something breaks, and version upgrades can be a bit bumpy."
F16 introduces a number of significant changes: GRUB 2 replaces legacy GRUB, HAL is gone and replaced by udisks, upower, and libudev, migration from SysV init to native Systemd continues(scheduled for completion in F17), and a number of cloud utilities and OpenStack are included. btrfs, the much-hyped filesystem that is supposed to become the Linux default, was supposed to be the default for Verne, but it's still not ready. The main snag is the lack of a dependable, fully-functional fsck, so look for it in F17. You can still use it if you like because it is an option in the installer when you set up partitions. And, as Adam Williamson revealed, "btrfs has been available as a Sekrit Option in the installer for several releases, you make it available by passing a kernel parameter to the installer. For a while this was, awesomely, 'icantbelieveitsnotbtr', but now it's just plain 'btrfs'."
More Spins of Fedora:-
- GNOME 3.2
- KDE
- LXDE
- XFCE
- Electronic Lab
- Security Lab
- Games
- Design Suite
