Fedora 17 Goes On A Diet, But With More Features

Fedora 17, codenamed the Beefy Miracle, has yet another new round of features. One of the items though includes this beefy release having DIET.

The Beefy Miracle's DIET is actually an open-source middleware for high performance computing (HPC) implementing the Grid RPC model. DIET will provide Fedora 17 with a grid toolkit for user management, tasks management, secure file management, and information/platform management.

Besides DIET, the Fedora 17 LiveCD is also looking to be re-worked to "figure a way to sanely support" for both LiveCDs and in a virtualized environment. Live media creation should be done using Red Hat's Anaconda instead of a Python-based image creation utility. This isn't directly an end-user benefit, but those interested can read about it on the Wiki.

Other new features for Fedora 17 include implementing an ABRT back-trace de-duplication service to reduce the number of duplicate bug reports submitted automatically upon experiencing a crash, a tool for customizing fonts on a per language-basis on desktops using fontconfig, and integrating English Typing Booster as a predictive ibus-based input method for attempting to auto-complete words based upon partial input. There's also now plans to update Fedora's Eclipse stack to the latest "Juno" releases, integrating the Opa 0.9 compiler, better Indian language support, DNSSEC on workstations, support for EXT4 file-systems beyond 16 terabytes in size, Haskell Platform 2011.4, IPAv3, Java 7, a new mkdumprd for kdump, virtualization sandbox support, a Non-Uniform Memory Alignment Daemon, supporting OpenStack's Quantum virtual networking service, OpenStack using Qpid, Ruby 1.9.3, Wallaby integration, and various other new packages and configuration changes.

Opa is a unified programming language designed for creating rich web application binaries. The version 3 update to IPA brings trusts to Active Directory domains, SE Linux management, and SSH public keys management.

The Java 7 feature of Fedora 17 will make the OpenJDK7 become the default Java run-time and Java build tool set for the Beefy Miracle. OpenJDK6 (Java 6) will be removed when this happens. OpenJDK is the official Java SE 7 reference implementation that reached a general availability status in July of 2011. Among the OpenJDK7 features are support for dynamically-typed languages at speeds close to that of the Java language itself, strict class-file checking, small language enhancements, an updated class-loader architecture, Unicode 6.0, locale enhancements, new I/O APIs, TLS 1.2 support, an X Render pipeline for Java 2D, an updated XML stack, and much more.

The features mentioned in this article are just the latest round of features for Fedora 17 that were approved during today's Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee meeting. The extensive list of Fedora 17 features can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki. There's also the meeting minutes from today's FESCo IRC meeting.

You can also read about Fedora 17 getting beefier in the last round of updates or some other new features that made it in at the start of the new year.

Fedora 17 is due for an official release in May.