Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle Goes Into Beta

The Beefy Miracle, a.k.a. Fedora 17, had its delayed beta release this morning.

Fedora 17 Beta is now available following the usual tradition of delays and it offers up an impressive feature-set for this distribution update that will hopefully go gold in May.

Various features of Fedora 17 Beta are mentioned in this earlier Phoronix article from when Fedora 17 Alpha was released last month. There is also the list on the Fedora Wiki.

The Fedora 17 Beta can be downloaded from FedoraProject.org.

At the moment the Fedora mailing list archive isn't updating with the F17 Beta announcement, so it's embedded below.

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... the Beta release of Beefy Miracle! Flying 'round the world at the speed of the intertubes, delivering progress, mustard, and freedom to the masses.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 17. Want to get a taste of the future? Download it now:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

== What is the Beta Release? ==

The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 17. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 17 in May. We invite you to join us in making Fedora 17 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback.

Of course, this is a beta release, meaning that some problems may still be lurking. A list of the problems we already know about is found at the Common F17 bugs page, seen here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F17_bugs

== Features ==

This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free software. Here are just a few of the new features:

On the desktop: GNOME 3.4 introduces many user experience improvements, including new search capabilities in the activities overview, improved themes, and enhancements to the Documents and Contacts applications. A new application, GNOME-boxes, provides easy access to virtual machines. Additionally, GIMP 2.8, the newest version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, brings new improvements such as single-window mode, layer groups, and on-canvas editing.

For developers: You never sausage a great array of development tools! Fedora 17 includes a pre-release of Juno, the release of the Eclipse SDK expected in June 2012. Java 7 (and OpenJDK 7) is the default Java runtime and Java build toolset, and GCC 4.7.x is now the primary compiler in Fedora. Other language refreshes include shipping Ruby 1.9.3, the latest stable version of the Ruby language, PHP 5.4, the latest PHP stack, and Erlang has also been updated to the R15 release.

Under the hood, and in the cloud: The Cluster stack in Fedora includes numerous and significant updates for both high availability and load-balancing applications. Fedora 17 utilizes Linux kernel 3.3, with improved btrfs and ext4 filesystems, GMA (poulsbo) graphics and Broadcom wireless chipset support, and numerous other bug fixes and enhancements. Firewalld is now the default firewall solution in Fedora, providing dynamic firewall configuration capabilities. Finally, OpenStack, a collection of services that can be used to set up and run cloud compute and storage infrastructure, has been updated to the latest release, 2012.1 (Essex).

Meanwhile there's still no word from Red Hat Legal concerning the codename to succeed the Beefy Miracle.