Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 15! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, developers, virtualization and system administration.
What's New in Fedora 15?
For desktop users
A universe of new features for end users:
- GNOME 3 Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers and GNOME 3 is well integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3 is polished, robust and extensible and Fedora includes several GNOME Shell Extensions and GNOME Tweak Tool in the repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team developers and community volunteers.
- Dynamic Firewall Fedora 15 includes a dynamic firewall background service called firewalld that is powerful and can maintain persistent connections while simultaneously offering the flexibility to change firewall settings without restarting the firewall. It also has a D-BUS interface to interact with clients or services, that request firewall changes. firewall-cmd is a user space alternative to iptables command. Thanks to Thomas Woerner from Red Hat for developing this feature.
- Robotics Suite Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a collection of packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments, utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into an easy-to-install package group. Refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Robotics for more details. Thanks to Tim Niemueller and Rich Mattes, Fedora community volunteers for their participation.
- Indic Typing Booster Indic Typing Booster is a predictive input method for ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input. One can then simply select word from suggestion list and improve typing speed with more accuracy and convenience. Thanks to the development lead by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team engineers in Pune, India.
- LibreOffice LibreOffice is community-driven and developed, free and open source personal productivity suite which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. It is a fork of Openoffice.org with a diverse community of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many volunteers. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream participation and maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.
- Sugar .92 Sugar is a desktop environment originally designed for OLPC and now evolved into a learning platform developed by the non-profit Sugar Labs foundation. This version provides major usability improvements for the first login screen and the control panel, as well as new features such as support for 3G networks. Thanks to Peter Robinson and Sebastian Dziallas, Fedora community volunteers for leading the integration of this environment.
For developers
For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:
GCC 4.6 GCC 4.6 is the system default compiler in Fedora 15 and all the relevant packages have been rebuild in Fedora 15 using it. Developers can see compiled code improvements and use the newly added features, such as improved C++0x support, support for the Go language, REAL*16 support in Fortran and many other improvements.
GDB 7.3 This new GDB release 7.3 together with Archer and Fedora extensions improves debugging experience on Fedora by making the debugger more powerful. The majority of these features were written by Red Hat engineers, thus benefiting all gdb users. New features for the Fedora 15 release include support for breakpoints at SystemTap markers (probes), support for using labels in the program's source, OpenCL language debugging support, thread debugging of core dumps and Python scripting improvements. Numerous important packages within Fedora are pre-built with SystemTap static markers, and these can now be used as the target for breakpoints in gdb.
Python 3.2 The system Python 3 stack has been upgraded to 3.2 (the system Python 2 stack remains at 2.7), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes see http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html
For system administrators
And don't think we forgot the system administrators:
- systemd systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. Thanks to Lennart Poettering and Rahul Sundaram from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in Fedora 15.
- BoxGrinder BoxGrinder is a set of free and open source tools used for building appliances (virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances (images/virtual machines) from simple plain text Appliance Definition Files. Thanks to Marek Goldmann from Red Hat.
- Consistent Network Device Naming Servers often have multiple Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX. This feature is enabled on all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later. Thanks to Jordan Hargrave, Matt Domsch and several other engineers from Dell for their long term upstream participation and integration of this feature in Fedora 15.
By changing the naming convention, system administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into some "sane" order.
And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of all the new features on board Fedora 15 is available at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList
OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.
If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading
For an quick tour of features in Fedora 15 and pictures of many friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_one_page_release_notes
Fedora 15 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
Fedora 15 common bugs are documented at:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs
Fedora Spins
Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. Fedora 15 includes four completely new spins in addition to the several already available, including Fedora Security Lab, Design Suite, Sugar on a Stick and Moblin spin. More information on these spins and much more is available at
http://spins.fedoraproject.org
Contributing
For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes:
There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can 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!
Fedora 16
Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 15 experience, our next release, Fedora 16, is already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early schedule for an end of Oct 2011 release:
Contact information
If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at: