Fedora 16 codenamed "Verne" got its first beta released yesterday. It is based GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity, includes the Linux 3.0 kernel & also includes the latest version of Blender, a 3D imaging tool, the latest Firefox beta and the usual updates for Perl and Python. It's also worth noting that Fedora has not followed Ubuntu's lead in moving to Mozilla's Thunderbird for email. Fedora 16 is sticking with the Evolution email client.

Quote:Download Fedora 16 Beta

Features

Cloud Updates Fedora now includes a number of new and improved features to support cloud computing, including HekaFS, a "cloud ready" version of GlusterFS, including additional auth*/crypto/multi-tenancy; pacemaker-cloud, application service high availability in a cloud environment; and IaaS implementations such as Aeolus and OpenStack.

Virtualization Once again Fedora raises the bar on virtualization support, including expanded virtual network support, an improved Spice for managing virtual machines, restored Xen support, a new virtual machine lock manager, and improved ability to browse guest file systems.

System Boot Fedora 16 introduces GRUB2, the long-awaited next-generation boot-loader for Linux. GRUB2 automatically recognizes other operating systems, supports LVM2 and LUKS partitions, and is more customizable than the previous version. In this release, only x86 systems with a BIOS uses GRUB2 by default. Work is ongoing for making GRUB2 the default for other architectures and systems.

Services Management Fedora 15 introduced the Systemd services management program. This release features better integration of Systemd via conversion to native systemd services from legacy init scripts in many software components -- for desktop users, this means faster boot times; for system administrators it means more powerful management of services.

Desktop Updates The two major desktop environments have been updated to the latest releases: KDE Software Compilation 4.7 and GNOME 3.1 development release. GNOME 3.2 is available in the updates testing repository, enabled by default in this release.


Njoy !!