Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Countdown to Fedora 11 Begins!

Fedora 11 is less than two weeks away. The excitement is in the air and we all can't wait to see the product of more than a few long months of hard work. It's prime time to start talking about what users can expect to see, highlight new features and describe some of the enhancements that we can all look forward too. As part of a series of podcast and print interviews, Today, I would like to present the first podcast in the Fedora 11 Podcast series, an interview with long time Fedora contributor and Fedora Release Engineer Jesse Keating. The audio can be found here:


In the interview, Jesse talks to us about the achievement milestone of putting together 11 releases, the process of planning and putting together a Fedora release, how it was done for F11 and also some of the tools, which he helped create which are used to put together the Fedora distribution. He talks about Pungi and Revisor which are tools used to compose the Fedora tree and create a custom remix or re-spin, respectively. He also talks about some of the changes which have taken place under the hood to enable Fedora's new faster and improved boot up. Jesse takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the greatest enhancements we can look forward to in F11, including changes to PackageKit and a new upstream version of RPM, the new default ext4 filesystem, enhanced fingerprint support for authentication and what we can look forward to in the future releases of Fedora.

The Full Fedora 11 Feature list can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList and you can look forward to more in depth coverage of some of those features and of the upcoming release in the days to come. Fedora 11 is sure to prove a highly innovative and technologically advanced release.

Fedora 11. Get ready. There's reason to be excited!