Fedora 13 has been released. Here the release announcement:
I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 13, the latest innovative
Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative
partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat.
If you can't wait to get the distribution, simply visit:
Get Fedora
If you want a quick tour of highlights in this release, check out:
F13 one page release notes - FedoraProject
You can also find this announcement text at:
Fedora 13 announcement - FedoraProject
Or read on for loads of information about the new release and all the
leading edge technologies we've packed into it. More links are
available at the end of this message, too. Enjoy!
* * *
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 13! 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, netbooks,
virtualization and system administration.
== What's New in Fedora 13? ==
=== For desktop users ===
A universe of new features for end users:
* Streamlined Installer. The user interface of Anaconda, the Fedora
installer, has changed to handle storage devices and partitioning in
an easy and streamlined manner, with helpful hints in the right
places. Thanks to Chris Lumens and others on the Anaconda team, and
MáirÃn Duffy, Fedora Design team lead, for her user interface
review.
* Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and PackageKit
for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a
printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it
if needed. Thanks to Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes.
* New desktop applications and enhancements. The Shotwell photo
manager, Deja-dup backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client,
and Simple Scan scanning utility are all delivered by default to
provide an enhanced desktop experience out of the box. Palimpsest,
the desktop utility for handling storage devices, can now manage LVM
and RAID disks easily. As with the past several releases, Fedora 13
includes enhanced webcam support. Hans de Goede from Red Hat has
specially focussed on better support for dual mode camera's for this
release.
* NetworkManager improvements include better Mobile Broadband,
Bluetooth, and new CLI abilities. NetworkManager was introduced in
Fedora 7 and has become the de facto network configuration solution
for distributions everywhere. NetworkManager is now a one-stop shop
for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up,
broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. In Fedora 13 NetworkManager adds
mobile broadband enhancements to show signal strength; support for
old-style dial-up networking (DUN) over Bluetooth; and command line
support in addition to the improved graphical user interface. Thanks
to Dan Williams of Red Hat for his extensive work on these features
upstream and within Fedora.
* Color management. Do you like your printouts to look the same as
they do on screen - or your scanner output to look the same as what
you just scanned? Color Management allows you to better set and
control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through
the gnome-color-manager package. Thanks to Richard Hughes from Red
Hat for his involvement upstream and in Fedora.
* Enhanced iPod functionality. Newer Apple iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone
models are supported by some of your favorite photo management
software and music library applications such as Rhythmbox. The
devices are automatically attached using the libimobiledevice
library, so you can work with your content more easily.
* Enhanced streaming and buffering support in Totem. Totem's Movie
Player and web browser plugins are now better at handling large
streaming media, such as HD movies and Podcasts, thanks to the new
disk-buffering support in GStreamer.
* 3D support for ATI cards (R600 and R700) via Radeon driver. In
Fedora 13, 3D support for many ATI cards has moved out of
experimental status and is enabled by default. 2D support for the
latest generation (R800) is integrated as well in this
release. Thanks to Red Hat's Dave Airlie and many others for
involvement upstream and in Fedora.
* Experimental 3D graphics support extended to free Nouveau driver for
NVidia cards. This release also adds experimental 3D support to a
wide range of NVidia cards, adding them to the list of liberated
video capabilities. Install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
package to try out the work in progress. Thanks to Red Hat's Ben
Skeggs for involvement upstream and in Fedora.
* KDE improvements. KDE in Fedora continues to provide tight
integration with the latest technologies in Fedora. In this release,
we have improved integration with PulseAudio via Phonon and the
volume control KMix, which controls per-application volumes and
moves application sounds between hardware devices, as well as with
the latest PolicyKit authorization framework. We have also
integrated new major versions, based on the KDE Development Platform
4, of the KOffice office suite, the K3b CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning
application and, for developers, the KDevelop IDE, which provide
better integration with the KDE 4 Plasma Desktop and no longer
require the KDE 3 compatibility libraries. Thanks to the work of a
growing community of KDE contributors in Fedora.
* DisplayPort support improvements. Fedora 12 added initial support
for the new DisplayPort display connector for Intel graphics
chips. Support for Nvidia and ATI systems has now been added in this
release. Thanks to Red Hat's Xorg team.
* Experimental user management interface. The user account tool has
been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and
accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to
configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or
icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options for
your Fedora system. Try out the work in progress. Thanks to Matthias
Clasen from Red Hat's Desktop team and others.
=== For developers ===
For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:
* SystemTap static probes. SystemTap now has expanded capabilities to
monitor higher-level language runtimes like Java, Python, and Tcl,
and also user space applications, starting with PostgreSQL. In the
future, Fedora will add support for even more user space
applications, greatly increasing the scope and power of monitoring
for application developers. Thanks to Mark Wielaard from Red Hat.
* Easier Python debugging. We've added new support that allows
developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in Fedora
to get more complete information when debugging with gdb, making
Fedora an exceptional platform for powerful, rapid application
development. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.
* Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable Python
3 stack will help programmers write and test code for use in both
Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, so you can future-proof your
applications now using Fedora. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.
* NetBeans Java EE 6 support. The NetBeans 6.8 integrated development
environment is the first IDE to offer complete support for the
entire Java EE 6 specification. Thanks to Victor G. Vasilyev from
Sun/Oracle for his maintenance and support of NetBeans in
collaboration with Fedora.
* IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Java IDE. Along with Eclipse and
NetBeans already provided by Fedora, IDEA is a popular Java-based
development environment newly introduced in this release. It comes
with an intuitive GUI, integration with Ant and Maven, extensive
language support, version control systems and test tools integration
and compatibility with Eclipse projects. Thanks to Lubomir Rintel
and Michal Ingeli, Fedora community volunteers, for packaging and
integration of this feature.
=== For system administrators ===
And don't think we forgot the system administrators:
* boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO). BFO allows users to download a single,
tiny image (could fit on a floppy) and install current and future
versions of Fedora without having to download additional
images. Thanks to Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure lead.
* System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded
features for logging into managed domains, including caching for
offline authentication. Now users on laptops can still login when
disconnected from the company's managed network. The authentication
configuration tool in Fedora has already been updated to support
SSSD, and work is underway to make it even more attractive and
functional. Thanks to Stephen Gallagher from Red Hat.
* Pioneering NFS features. Fedora offers the latest version 4 of the
NFS protocol for better performance, and, in conjunction with recent
kernel modifications, includes IPv6 support for NFS as well. Thanks
to Steve Dickson from Red Hat.
* Zarafa Open Source edition Groupware. Zarafa Open Source edition is
a complete, 100% free and open source groupware suite that can be
used as a drop-in Microsoft Exchange replacement for Web-based mail,
calendaring, collaboration, and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP and
iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the ability
to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full set of
programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel using modern
Ajax technologies. Thanks to Robert Scheck, Fedora community
volunteer, for packaging and integration of this feature.
* Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating
lightweight, copy-on-write filesystem snapshots that can be mounted
(and booted into) selectively. Automated snapshots allow system
owners to easily revert to a filesystem from the previous day, or
from before a yum update using the yum-plugin-fs-snapshot
plugin. Btrfs is still an experimental filesystem in this release
and requires a "btrfs" installation option to enable support for
it. (This option is only available for non-live images.) Upcoming
releases will integrate the snapshot functionality into the desktop
while working on stabilization of the filesystem in parallel. Thanks
to Josef Bacik, Btrfs filesystem developer at Red Hat, for
filesystem work and the new yum plugin and Chris Ball from OLPC team
for leading this effort.
* LVM Snapshots merging support. Recent LVM (and device-mapper)
snapshot advances included in Fedora 13 allow system owners to merge
an LVM snapshot back into the origin. In the process you can
rollback the origin LV to the state it was in before the system
upgrade. As noted earlier, the yum-snapshot-fs-plugin can work with
both Btrfs and LVM volumes exposing this functionality and making it
easier to use. This feature was developed and merged upstream by Red
Hat's storage team.
* Virtualization enhancements. Fedora continues its leadership in
virtualization technologies with improvements to KVM such as Stable
PCI Addresses and Virt Shared Network Interface technologies. Having
stable PCI addresses will enable virtual guests to retain PCI
addresses' space on a host machine. The shared network interface
technology enables virtual machines to use the same physical network
interface cards (NICs) as the host operating system. Fedora 13 also
enhances performance of virtualization via VHostNet acceleration of
KVM networking, Virtx2apic for enhanced guest performance on large
multi-processor systems, and Virtio-Serial for simple IO between the
guest and host user spaces. Thanks to the Red Hat virtualization
team for their ongoing contributions.
* Dogtag Certificate System Dogtag is an enterprise-class open source
Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate
lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smart card
management. Brought into the fold as part of the Red Hat acquisition
of Netscape technologies, this certificate server is fully free and
open source and now included in Fedora. Thanks to the PKI team at
Red Hat.
And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of
all the new features on board Fedora 13 is available at:
Releases/13/FeatureList - FedoraProject
OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.
Announcement
If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to
Upgrading - FedoraProject
In particular, Fedora has made preupgrade a more robust solution and
pushed several bug fixes to older releases of Fedora to enable an easy
upgrade to Fedora 13.
For an quick tour of features in Fedora 13 and pictures of many
friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:
F13 one page release notes - FedoraProject
Fedora 13 full release notes and guides for several languages are
available at:
Fedora Documentation
Fedora 13 common bugs are documented at:
Common F13 bugs - FedoraProject
=== Fedora Spins ===
Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various
types of users via hand-picked application set or
customizations. Fedora 13 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
Fedora Spins
== Power PC Support ==
With Apple moving to Intel based machines and Sony PlayStation
dropping Linux support, Fedora PowerPC (PPC) usage has dropped
considerably. In Fedora 13, PPC is now a secondary architecture and
the Fedora release engineering team no longer manages PPC releases. If
you would like to participate in the PPC effort or any of the
secondary architecture teams, refer to:
Architectures - FedoraProject
== 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:
Fedora Documentation
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
Fedoraproject today!
== Fedora 14 ==
Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes
to improve the Fedora 13 experience, our next release, Fedora 14, 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 2010 release:
Releases/14/Schedule - FedoraProject
