| Fedora 11 ships with new community portal |
Jun. 10, 2009
 The Fedora Project has released the final Fedora 11 version of its community-sponsored, Red Hat-related Linux distribution, along with a new community portal for package maintainer collaboration. Fedora 11 improvements include better package management, ext4 support, virtualization features, audio enhancements, and faster boots, the group says.
As reported when the beta version showed up in late March, the open source Fedora 11 is claimed to offer more new features than any previous Fedora release. The release's new package management features are being supported with the beta release of a new "Fedora Community" community portal aimed at package maintainers. The portal provides a GUI "dashboard" for tracking contributions, conversations, and updates, says the project.
Fedora Community's Moksha architecture
(Click to enlarge)
The aim of the still bare-bones project is "to create a modular web page in which each module would pull views from the various Fedora resources and display them to the user," says the project. The site is built upon new "Moksha" web mashup technology, which is said to be based on TurboGears 2 and jQuery (see diagram above).
Fedora 11 quickens boot time, gambles on ext4
Fedora 11 is notable for its faster boot times, which are claimed to be as short as 20 seconds on some systems. The release is also one of the first major Linux distros to make the newly supported ext4 filesystem the default instead of ext3. (This move may have its critics -- Linux Foundation CTO Ted Ts'o, for example, recently dismissed ext4 as a rehash of outdated "1970's technology.")
Fedora 11
(Click to enlarge)
As detailed in our sister publication, eWEEK, Fedora 11 offers the following key features:- Automatic font and mimetype installation that downloads support as needed for foreign-language documents and other content types
- Enhancements to the PackageKit cross-distribution package manager
- IBus input method system for switching locales without having to restart session
- Improved kernel mode-setting features, improving boot-time and enhancing support for more video cards, including NVidia, ATI, and Intel adapters
- Support for the latest file systems, including the default ext4, with much higher device and file size limits, and faster consistency checking
- Improved virtualization features, including more flexible and interactive console, and a rewritten VM creation wizard
- MinGW cross-compiler tool set for creating Windows executables
- Fingerprint reader support
- "Archer" Gdb development branch for C++ and Python
- Automatic bug-reporting tool
- Application updates, including Gnome 2.26, KDE 4.2, Xfce 4.6, GCC 4.4, NetBeans IDE 6.5, Python 2.6, Thunderbird 3, and Firefox 3.1.
Similar, but not identical to, the subscription-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora is billed as being "free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute." Fedora 10, which shipped last November to generally positive reviews, was notable for vastly improving its NetworkManager application.
Stated Fedora Project leader, Paul Frields, "The Fedora Community portal project is going to provide new ways to engage our community members and improve the way they collaborate. The portal project uses a new Web framework, built on best-of-breed open-source components, that has the capability to provide a more real-time experience. Ultimately, we intend for this portal to become a single, simple and usable online tool our community members can customize to produce and organize their Fedora contributions."
Availability
Fedora 11 final is available now for free download, says the Fedora Project. Release notes, with links to downloads, may be found here, and the beta Fedora Community site may be found here.
The eWEEK story on the final release of Fedora 11 may be found here, and its slideshow of Fedora 11 features may be found here.
-- Eric Brown
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