Fedora 11 Alpha Comes With Huge Feature Set

While a few delays were experienced by the Red Hat engineers and community working on Fedora 11 (a.k.a. Leonidas), the first alpha release of this popular Linux distribution is now available. The 11th release of Fedora will bring a huge set of new features and updated packages, with much of the work already being visible in Fedora 11 Alpha.

Starting with the installation, Fedora 11 is now using the EXT4 file-system by default but there is support built into the Anaconda installer for Btrfs, which recently entered the mainline Linux kernel.

Some of the desktop features in Fedora 11 include a new GNOME volume control interface, and PackageKit firmware support.

Fedora 11 will ship with GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, X Server 1.6, and the Linux 2.6.29 kernel.

Fedora 11 also provides a preview of MinGW, which is an environment for developers to cross-compile their programs to run on Windows but being built on Fedora.

The release notes for Fedora 11 are available at FedoraProject.org. The announcement with download links can be found on the Fedora mailing list. Next week we will be delivering benchmarks of Fedora 11 at Phoronix.