The Top Features Of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow"

With Fedora 18 entering its feature freeze and branching today, here's a rundown of some of the most interesting features to be found in this next Fedora release.

Fedora 18 is codenamed the Spherical Cow and is scheduled to be released in November with features including:

- A preview of a new package manager for Fedora. DNF is the new experimental package manager for Fedora 18 that's currently a fork of Yum 3.4. With DNF is also Hawkey, a new package management library built atop libsolv. DNF uses a SAT solver for dependency resolving, strict API definitions for plug-ins and extending projects, a leaner code-base than Yum, and is expected to offer better performance on a smaller memory foot-print. DNF will be installed alongside Yum in Fedora 18 so it's left up to the user to choose which package management implementation they wish. RPM will also be at version 4.10 in Fedora 18.

- 256 color terminals by default, finally. Right now the terminal has just been limited to displaying eight different colors.

- Cloud computing improvements with the availability of Eucalyptus, introducing Heat, OpenStack Folsom, and other improvements.

- A new Anaconda installer user-interface to improve the Fedora installation experience. They also hope to improve the initial setup experience for the Spherical Cow.

- Offline system updates via systemd and PackageKit.

- A QXL/SPICE KMS driver for use with QEMU/KVM virtualization and some of the server chipsets will feature KMS drivers too.

- Updated desktops with KDE SC 4.9, Xfce 4.10, Sugar 0.98, GNOME 3.6, etc.

- Secure Boot support so that Fedora Linux can play well with retail PCs that are certified for Microsoft Windows 8.

Other Fedora 18 features are detailed at length on the Fedora Project Wiki.