October 19, 2009, 4:41 am
I just spent a fun hour and a half with Rahul bashing on the Fedora 12 Beta announcement text, trying to keep it as short and readable as possible while highlighting as many of the awesome new features in Fedora 12 as we could. It was a great way to get some of the great stuff we’re bringing into this release clear in my head, and it makes me even more excited about the release! Just the topic headings are enough to whet your appetite:
Smaller and faster updates
NetworkManager broadband and other enhancements
Next-generation Ogg Theora video
Graphics support improvements
Virtualization improvements
Automatic reporting of crashes and SELinux issues
New Dracut initrd generation tool
PackageKit plugins
Bluetooth on-demand
Moblin graphical interface for netbooks
PulseAudio enhancements
Lower process privileges
SELinux sandbox
Open Broadcom firmware
Hybrid live images
Better webcam support
GNOME 2.28
GNOME Shell preview
KDE 4.3
I’m especially happy about the PulseAudio changes that land in this release (and, to be fair to our erstwhile fellow distributions, in Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10 as well, for the most part). Awesome features like having any audio device on your system show up to any UPnP client as a UPnP server – any audio being played on that device will automatically play on the client – and great Bluetooth integration – so any Bluetooth audio device you pair with will show up as a device in PulseAudio just like any other card in your system – really help to tell the PulseAudio story. These are the kinds of things that either just never got done or got done in really unusable, half-assed ways before we had PulseAudio, and now it’s as easy as crashing my phone is this evening (and believe me, that’s pretty easy). Fantastic job by all the PA developers.
