What's New in Fedora 18?

The Fedora Project takes great pride in being able to show off features for all types of use cases, including traditional desktop users, systems administration, development, the cloud, and many more. But a few new features are guaranteed to be seen by nearly anyone installing Fedora and are improvements that deserve to be called out on their own.

The user interface for Fedora's installation software, Anaconda, has been completely re-written from the ground up. Making its debut in Fedora 18, the new UI introduces major improvements to the installation experience. It uses a hub-and-spoke model that makes installation easier for new users, offering them concise explanations about their choices. Advanced users and system administrators are of course still able to take advantage of more complex options. The general look and feel of the installation experience has been vastly upgraded, providing modern, clean, and comprehensible visuals during the process. While the new installer should work well for most users in most configurations, there are inevitably a few teething problems in the first release of such a major revision: see the introductory guide to the new installer which includes a list of known limitations of the new installer in Fedora 18, and known significant bugs for more information. We welcome your constructive and specific feedback as we continue to work on refining the installer for future releases.

The upgrade process for Fedora now uses a new tool called FedUp (Fedora Upgrader). FedUp replaces pre-upgrade as well as the DVD methods for upgrading that have been used in previous Fedora releases. FedUp integrates with systemd to enable the upgrade functionality, doing the work in a pristine boot environment.

Of course, it wouldn't be a release announcement without a spotted--er, dotted--list of all the other fantastic features you'll see in Fedora 18:

For desktop users

Moooove over, stale desktops. We've got a small herd of choices udderly suited to your preferences.

• GNOME 3.6 The newest version of the GNOME desktop provides an enhanced Messaging Tray, support for Microsoft Exchange and Skydrive, and many more new features. For more information, visit the GNOME release notes.

• Cinnamon Fedora users now have the option of using Cinnamon, an advanced desktop environment based on GNOME 3. Cinnamon takes advantage of advanced features provided by the GNOME backend while providing users with a more traditional desktop experience.

• MATE Desktop The MATE desktop provides users with a classic GNOME 2.x style user interface. This desktop is perfect for users who have been running GNOME Classic or other window managers like XFCE as an alternative to GNOME 3.

• KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 KDE Plasma Workspaces has been updated with many new features and improved stability and performance, including updates to the Dolphin File Manager, Konsole, and KWin Window manager.

• Xfce 4.10 The lightweight and easy-to-use Xfce desktop has been updated to the 4.10 version with many bug fixes and enhancements, including a new MIME type editor, a reworked xfce4-run dialog, improved mouse settings, tabs in the Thunar file manager, and options to tile windows in xfwm4. Through all of these and more, Xfce continues to improve without getting in your way.

Regardless of your desktop choice, Fedora 18 offers...

• Improved storage management SSM (System Storage Manager) is an easy-to-use command-line interface tool that presents a unified view of storage management tools. Devices, storage pools, volumes, and snapshots can now be managed with one tool, with the same syntax for managing all of your storage. (It's great for systems administrators, too!)

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of moo-tivating goodies:

• Fresh versions of programming languages Using Perl, Rails, or Python? All three of these languages are updated in Fedora 18. We've got Rails 3.2, Python 3.3, and Perl 5.16 fresh off the farm.

• Clojure Clojure gets more love with the addition of tooling packages, including the Leinengen build tool, as well as Clojure libraries and frameworks, including Korma and Noir.

• DragonEgg connects GCC and LLVM DragonEgg is a plugin for the GCC compilers to allow use of the LLVM optimization and code-generation framework. DragonEgg provides software developers with more optimization and code-generation options for use with the GCC compilers. DragonEgg also allows GCC to be used for cross-compilation to target architectures supported by LLVM without requiring any special cross-compilation compiler packages. Fedora continues to develop and use GCC as the standard default compiler.

For systems administrators

Keep track of your infrastructure herds with these new features:

• Offline system updates Systems can now be updated offline, allowing for a more stable update of critical system components. This functionality is only integrated with GNOME Desktop Environment in this release but uses the distribution neutral PackageKit and systemd API's and hence can be made available for other desktop environments as well based on the interest from upstream developers.

• Storage enhancements StorageManagement is a collection of tools and libraries for managing storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).

• Samba 4 This popular suite of tools has long provided file- and print-sharing services in heterogeneous operating system environments. The long-awaited Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols and includes a new scripting interface, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals.

• Riak A fault-tolerant key-value store, Riak provides easy operations and predictable scaling as a NoSQL database.

For clouds and virtualization

Do you spend your days grazing gazing into the clouds? Here's just a taste of some of the cloud and virt features you'll see in Fedora 18:

• Eucalyptus Eucalyptus makes its first appearance in Fedora, with their 3.2 release included in F18. This platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network, and storage.

• OpenStack With the Folsom release in Fedora 18, OpenStack continues to have the newest releases in Fedora. This open source cloud computing platform enables users to deploy their own cloud infrastructures for private or public cloud deployments. Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is also available in F18, providing an API that enables the orchestration of cloud applications using file or web based templates.

• oVirt Engine The management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, oVirt Engine, is updated to the newest version, 3.1. This release includes extensive new features, including support for live snapshots, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, quotas, and more.

• Suspend and resume support for virt guests Virtual machines get love with this feature, enabling the ability to suspend and resume guests, with the close of a laptop lid or menu option or via the command line.

And that's only the beginning. For a more complete list with details of all the new features in Fedora 18, steer over to:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/FeatureList

Downloads, upgrades, documentation, and common bugs

• The steaks are high--don't miss out on installing the best version of Fedora yet! Get it now:

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

• If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading

• Fedora has replaced pre-upgrade with FedUp(excuse the pun.. or don't), a more robust solution, and pushed several bug fixes to older releases of Fedora to enable an easy upgrade to Fedora 18.

Graze...er, gaze...upon the full release notes for Fedora 18, guides for several languages, and learn about known bugs and how to report new ones, here:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

• With all the changes to the installer, we particularly recommend reading the Installation Guide:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/index.html

• Everyone makes missteaks. Fedora 18 common bugs are documented at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F18_bugs This page includes information on several known bugs in the installer, so we recommend reading it before installing Fedora 18.

Fedora Spins

Fedora spins are alternate versions of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations, from desktop options to spins for those interested in gaming, robotics, or design software. More information on our various spins is available at:

http://spins.fedoraproject.org

Contributing

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 19

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora number experience, our next release, Fedora 19, is already being developed in parallel and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early plan for release at the end of May 2013, and the final schedule for F19 is going to be based on the results of the planning process:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/19/Schedule

Feature Deprecation

Fedora has always been full of great features, but sometimes we need to cull the herd. Saying good-bye is always hard, but here are the ones we had to put out to pasture this time around.

• /etc/sysconfig Deprecations Several system configurations have moved out of /etc/sysconfig. The goal of these changes is to reduce (http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-new-configuration-files.html) the unnecessary differences between Linux distributions and share a standard location for common settings. For a list of changes read the release notes. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/index.html