F11 Talking Points

There a number of new features, enhancements and improvement coming up in Fedora 11. Here are just a few of those:

For desktop users and everyone

VolumeControl - The multimedia experience of Fedora users is improved by an easily understandable and much more flexible volume control model. With the use of PulseAudio by default, it makes sense to no longer expose the unintuitive plethora of volume controls and channels that alsa exports, and which is currently reflected 1-1 in the gnome volume control tools (gnome-volume-control and mixer applet). PulseAudio already ships with a volume control app, pavucontrol, that is packaged for Fedora (but not installed by default).

Presto (Delta RPMs) - Support for the yum Presto plugin which will give users the option of not downloading whole package updates and instead using Delta RPMs to build packages locally. This will enable users of dial up connections and others in network-scarce environments to keep up-to-date.

Fingerprint - Extensive work has been done to make Fingerprint readers easy to use as an authenticaton mechanism. Currently, using Fingerprint readers is a bit of a pain, and installing/using fprint and its pam module take more time than should ever be necessary. The goal of this feature is to make it painless by providing all the required pieces in Fedora, together with nicely integrated configuration.

Filesystem - Ext4 is the now the default FS in Fedora. The ext4 filesystem has more features and generally better performance than ext3, which is showing its age in the Linux filesystem world.

Windows Cross Compiler - The Fedora MinGW project's mission is to provide an excellent development environment for Fedora users who wish to cross-compile their programs to run on Windows, minimizing the need to use Windows at all. In the past developers have had to port and compile all of the libraries and tools they have needed, and this huge effort has happened independently many times over. We aim to eliminate duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools which have already been ported to the cross-compiler environment. This means that developers will not need to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.