F20 release announcement

We can say with great certainty the Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 20 ("Heisenbug"). The 20th release of this leading-edge, free and open source operating system also coincides with the 10th year of the Fedora Project's existence.

Download it now:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Detailed information about this release can be seen in the release notes:

FIXME (LINK GOES HERE)

Dedicated to Seth Vidal

On July 8th, the Fedora Project lost Seth Vidal, a dedicated, tireless, and brilliant contributor. Seth was a lead developer of Yum and the Fedora update repository system, and worked to make sure that the technical and community infrastructure of Fedora worked well and consistently for users and contributors around the world. Seth has touched the lives of hundreds of Fedora contributors directly, and millions indirectly by improving the experience of using and updating Fedora.

The Fedora Project would like to dedicate the Fedora 20 release to Seth, and ask that you join us in remembering his generous spirit and incredible work that has helped make Fedora what it is today. We miss you Seth.

10 Years of Fedora

The Fedora 20 release coincides nicely with the 10th anniversary of Fedora. The first Fedora release (then called Fedora Core 1) came out on November 6, 2003.

Since then, the Fedora Project has become an active and vibrant community that produces nearly a dozen "spins" that are tailor made for desktop users, hardware design, gaming, musicians, artists, and early classroom environments.

ARM as a Primary Architecture

While Fedora has supported a number of hardware architectures over the years, x86/x86_64 has been the default for the majority of Fedora users and for the Linux community in general.

ARM, however, has been making massive strides. It already dominates the mobile market, and is becoming a go-to platform for hobbyists and makers, and is showing enormous promise for the server market as well.

In keeping with Fedora's commitment to innovation, the Fedora community has been pushing to make ARM a primary architecture to satisfy the needs of users and developers targeting the ARM platform.

Maturity and Advanced Features

Sometimes it's not the big new features that make a users' experience better, it's the little enhancements or long-awaited tricky features that really help make a new release the bee's knees.

NetworkManager Improvements

NetworkManager is getting several improvements in Fedora 20 that will be welcome additions for power users and system administrators.

Users will now be able to add, edit, delete, activate, and de-activate network connections via the nmcli command line tool, which will make life much easier for non-desktop uses of Fedora.

NetworkManager is also getting support for bonding interfaces and bridging interfaces. Bonding and bridging are used in many enterprise setups and are necessary for virtualization and fail-over scenarios.

No Default Sendmail, Syslog

Fedora 20 removes some services that many users find unnecessary, though (of course) they will remain available as installable packages for users who might need them.

The systemd journal now takes the place as the default logging solution, having been tested and able to manage persistent logging in place of syslog.

Also, Sendmail will no longer be installed by default, as most Fedora installs have no need of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

Cloud and Virtualization Improvements

The Fedora 20 release continues the Fedora tradition of adopting and integrating leading edge technologies used in cloud computing. This release includes a number of features that will make working with virtualization and cloud computing much easier.

First-Class Cloud Images

The Fedora Cloud SIG has been working hard on providing images that are well-suited to running as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack.

If you're using public or private cloud, you should grab one of the downloadable Cloud Images or find a supported EC2 Image here:

[1]

VM Snapshot UI with virt-manager

This change will make taking VM snapshots much easier. qemu and libvirt have all the major pieces in place for performing safe VM snapshots/checkpoints, however there isn't any simple discoverable UI. This feature will track adding that UI to virt-manager, and any other virt stack bits that need to be fixed/improved. This includes adding functionality to libvirt to support deleting and rebasing to external snapshots.

ARM on x86 with libvirt/virt-manager

This change will fix running ARM VMs on x86 hosts using standard libvirt tools libvirt virsh, virt-manager and virt-install.

Developer Goodness

As always, Fedora 20 will include several new features and updated packages that will be of interest to all manner of developers.

WildFly 8

WildFly 8 is the next version of the application server previously known as JBoss Application Server. With WildFly 8, it's possible to run your Java EE 7 applications with unparalleled speed.

WildFly 8 boasts a optimized boot process that starts services concurrently to eliminate unnecessary waits, and taps into the power of multi-core processors. At the same time, WildFly takes an aggressive approach to memory management, and keeps its memory footprint exceptionally small compared to other JVMs.

Ruby on Rails 4.0

Ruby on Rails 4.0

This update will keep Fedora up-to-date and will ensure that the current Ruby on Rails developers stay with us as they will get support for system-packaged Ruby on Rails of the latest version. Apart from that, Rails 4.0 also bring improved functionality, speed. security and better modularization.

Even More Changes

Fedora prides itself on bringing cutting-edge technologies to users of open source software around the world, and this release continues that tradition. No matter what you do, Fedora 20 has the tools you need to help you get things done.

A complete list with details of each new change is available here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet

Desktop Environments and Spins

The Fedora project strives to provide the best desktop experiences possible for users, from desktop environment to application selection.

GNOME 3.10

Fedora 20 comes with GNOME 3.10. GNOME 3.10 will have a number of new applications and new features that will please GNOME-lovers in the Fedora 20 release. This release includes a new music application (gnome-music), a new maps application (gnome-maps), a revamp for the system status menu, and Zimbra support in Evolution.

KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11

The Fedora KDE SIG has rebased to KDE 4.11 for Fedora 20. This release includes faster Nepomuk indexing, improvements to Kontact, KScreen integration in KWin, Metalink/HTTP support for KGet, and much more.

Spins

Spins are alternate versions of Fedora. In addition to various desktop environments for Fedora, spins are also available as tailored environments for various types of users via hand-picked application sets or customizations.

To see all of the Official Fedora 20 Release Spins, see the Fedora 20 Release Spins link.

Nightly composes of alternate Spins are available here: http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes

Contributing

We hope that you're excited to have Fedora 20 in your hands, and are looking forward to using it and exploring its new features and many improvements over Fedora 19. But that's not all! Fedora never stands still, we're always working towards a new and better release and sharing our work with the world. Want to be part of the fun? It's easy to get involved!

There are many ways to contribute to Fedora, even if it's just bug reporting. You can also help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!