The Fedora Project today announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 12 includes a robust feature set for desktop users, administrators, developers and open source enthusiasts alike. New enhancements available in Fedora 12 include next-generation Ogg Theora video, virtualization improvements and advancements to NetworkManager, among numerous others.
“Fedora always looks to include the latest cutting-edge features in its distribution and we believe that Fedora 12 stays true to this pattern, packing a lot of punch across its feature set,” said Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. “Our community of global contributors continues to expand, with about 25 percent growth in Fedora Accounts since the release of Fedora 11. We’ve also seen more than 2.3 million installations of Fedora 11 thus far, which is a 20 percent increase over the previous release.”
Notable feature enhancements in Fedora 12 are:
- Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, enhancing the quality of free video to better meet user expectations. Ogg Theora video in Fedora 12 delivers crisp, vibrant media, enabling users to stream and download high-definition video while using 100 percent free and open software, codecs and formats.
- Introduced in Fedora 7, NetworkManager has become the de facto network configuration solution for multiple distributions. Network Manager improvements in Fedora 12 make it easier for users to be online using mobile broadband, or configure servers or other special situations.
- Virtualization is an increasingly important part of IT infrastructures and the Fedora community has delivered a large number or virtualization-related features in Fedora 12 including better virtual disk performance and storage discovery, hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption, and a modern network booting infrastructure. These new, higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable and easy to manage solutions.
Other features in Fedora 12 are PackageKit command-line and browser plugins; better file compression to save disk space and time; libguestfs, which lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without booting those guests; SystemTap 1.0, with improvements to help developers trace and gather information for writing and debugging programs, as well as integration with the widely-used Eclipse IDE; and NetBeans 6.7.1. Learn more about all of the features in Fedora 12.
Fedora aims to deliver a complete operating system approximately every six months. In just under one year’s time, the Fedora community has released Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 which, when coupled together, deliver a very large and compelling feature set available for incorporation into other Linux distributions. Technologists looking to the future can preview functionality which may appear in future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in this release of Fedora.
The Fedora community is vibrant and continues to grow. In 2009, the community held fifteen Fedora Activity Day events across the globe. These are mini-conferences where Fedora experts gather to work on a specific set of tasks, ranging from developing new features and web applications, to showing new and existing contributors how to get involved in Fedora by working on simple tasks. During that same period the Fedora Project also held three Fedora Users and Developers Conferences (FUDCons) around the world, in Boston, Porto Alegre, and Berlin. Thanks to a focused effort by the community Ambassador leadership on mentoring, the Ambassador ranks continue to grow steadily, with almost 700 active members worldwide and Fedora 12 release parties planned around the world.
Watch the Fedora 12 release video to learn more about new features and the Fedora community. There are also many Fedora 12 release events being held across the globe. To find an event near you where the Fedora Project will appear, please visit the Fedora Events calendar.
