Fedora 18 To Get MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Etc

We're nearing the point of the Fedora 18 feature freeze, but another large list of features were approved today for the next major release of Fedora Linux.

Fedora 18 features that were approved at this Monday's Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee include:

- With the imminent release of Samba 4.0, this major release will be incorporated into Fedora 18.

- The MATE Desktop, a fork of the GNOME2 packages, will be making its way into the Fedora 18 repository.

- oVirt Engine 3.1 will be available as the latest version of the oVirt virtualization platform with many new features.

- Agent-Free Systems Management.

- Sugar 0.98 from the OLPC project will be available. Sugar 0.98 Learning Environment does more porting to GTK+3 and other changes like GStreamer 1.0 support and multi-touch handling. Sugar 0.98 is also optimized for tablet interfaces.

- LTTng 2.0 will be made available from the F18 repository.

- OwnCloud packages for both the client and server infrastructure will be made available to Fedora 18 users.

- As a technology preview will be a desktop session service for aggregating online print services such as network IPP servers, Google Cloud Print, HP ePrint, and other services.

- SELinux Systemd Access Control.

- IPA v3 Trusts to Active Directory Domains will be supported.

- Python 3.3 will be in use for Fedora 18, compared to Python 3.2 in Fedora 17.

- FedFS, the Federated File System, will become a Fedora option for an extensible standardized mechanism to construct a coherent namespace across multiple file servers.

- The various server KMS drivers that David Airlie has been hacking on will be included in Fedora 18.

- There will be LLVM support on 64-bit POWER systems.

- VNCServer support for LLVMpipe/Mesa on 64-bit IBM Power Systems. This IBM Power work is needed since IBM Power Systems lack a proper DRI2 3D driver.

- SystemTap 2.0 will be available in Fedora 18.

- NFSometer will become an option for an NFS performance measurement framework of different workloads across NFS protocol versions and other options.

- QXL/SPICE should finally get a KMS driver! "Currently the QXL driver is X.org only, a KMS driver is required to move forward with projects like spice 3D, and also to allow more features to be show in virt environments like plymouth." For plans going back a few months, see SPICE On KVM/QEMU Works Towards Gallium3D.

The meeting notes from today's FESCo gathering can be found on the Fedora devel list. Other Fedora 18 features are talked about in last week's article.

Fedora 18 is scheduled for release in November. On the 7th of August id the Fedora 18 feature freeze while the first alpha release will come by the end of August.