Fedora 18 Granted Some Feature Freeze Exceptions

While the feature freeze is now in effect for Fedora 18, the Spherical Cow has been fed some feature freeze exceptions to enrich this forthcoming Linux distribution.

At today's Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting the following features were approved while now into the freeze window:

- GNOME 3.6 will be bundled by default in Fedora 18. Among the GNOME 3.6 features is providing accessibility support for GTK3 applications by default, support for SkyDrive and Microsoft Exchange with GNOME Online Accounts, initial support for input sources, the GNOME magnifier can handle brightness/contrast modifications, improved printer support, support for Enterprise accounts with the user panel, a new screen lock and log-in screen, improved Kerberos support, and a message tray redesign.

- Simplified crash reporting via ABRT server for user-reported problems. This feature is meant to reduce the complexity and time needed to submitting crash reports, in hopes of getting more reports from Fedora users.

- Rngd from the rng-tools package will now be enabled by default. The rngd service is for providing hardware random number generator support by taking use of architectural features, such as Intel's RDRAND x86 instruction set / Bull Mountain in the latest Intel "Ivy Bridge" CPUs. This rngd support by default and as early as possible is meant to improve the random number support within Fedora. In particular this will enhance the security for embedded systems, servers, and virtual machines.

Those were the features approved at Monday's FESCo meeting. The FESCo board also agreed that they're "happy with current state of feature process" now into the F18 feature freeze. Meeting notes are available on the Fedora development list.

Other new features for the Spherical Cow are talked about in The Top Features Of Fedora 18.