Fedora 17 Has More Features: GIMP 2.8, GCC 4.7, oVirt, Etc

Fedora 17 (a.k.a. the Beefy Miracle) already has an impressive list of new features coming, but several more features have been added to their planned list.

The Beefy Miracle already has a beefy list of possible changes like maybe the Btrfs file-system by default, multi-touch advancements, GNOME Shell software rendering, and many other features, but now there's even more.

At the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting on Monday (9 January), several more Fedora 17 features were approved. Here's the features that were just approved to be part of the Beefy Miracle:

- Erland R15 language support.

- GCC 4.7 as the default compiler. All F17 packages will also be re-built against GCC 4.7.x.

- GHC 7.4 update, a.k.a. the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

- The GIMP 2.8 image application and its plethora of changes.

- The GNOME 3.4 package set as the default desktop environment and replacing GNOME 3.2 as found in Fedora 16.

- Lohit Unicode 6.0 support, which is for Indian scripts (Assamese/Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Oriya, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu) with improved fonts too.

- The Linux kernel in Fedora 17 will now enable the LIO target sub-system for iSCSI and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) support.

- The OpenStack build found in Fedora 17 will use libguestfs for greater control over virtual disk images.

- Package pre-sets for RPMs.

- PHP 5.4 as the default PHP stack. PHP 5.4 brings many improvements like a built-in HTTP web server, traits, closure improvements, and other new language features.

- Riak will be added to the Beefy Miracle release. Riak is a NoSQL database. "Riak is a Dynamo-inspired key/value store, written in Erlang, that scales predictably and easily. Riak also simplifies development by giving developers the ability to quickly prototype, test, and deploy their applications. A truly fault-tolerant system, Riak has no single point of failure. No machines are special or central in Riak, so developers and operations professionals can decide exactly how fault-tolerant they want and need their applications to be."

- To be integrated in Fedora 17 is ibus-pinyin as a new libpinyin back-end for "intelligent sentence-based Chinese pinyin input."

- The oVirt open virtualization project will see its components integrated into Fedora 17.

The minutes from yesterday's FESCo meeting where these latest features were approved can be found on the Fedora devel mailing list. The Fedora 17 feature list of official items can be found on the Fedora Wiki.

The official release of Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" is planned for early May. The Fedora 17 Alpha release (the first development release) is planned for the end of February, but as always the latest F17 development work can be checked out via Rawhide.