Nearing The Release Of Fedora 13

Last week marked the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, this week there was the releases of PCLinuxOS 2010.1 and a new openSUSE 11.3 milestone, and planned for unveiling in just over a week is the final release of Fedora 13. This week the Fedora 13 release candidate is available via their compose system as all hands are on deck to prepare for the release of Goddard.

The screenshots you see in this article are taken from a Fedora 13 nightly snapshot via compose on 2010-05-06 and represent what the final Fedora 13 "Goddard" experience should look like. Some of our favorite features for Fedora 13 include Btrfs system rollback support, Nouveau's Classic Mesa and Gallium3D drivers being readily available, Anaconda installer improvements, better DisplayPort support for open-source graphics drivers, the GNOME 2.30 desktop (and KDE 4.4 too), many package updates, and NetworkManager improvements.

On the underside of Fedora 13 is the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, X Server 1.8, GCC 4.4, OpenOffice.org 3.2, and all updated open-source graphics drivers.

Going forward, the codename for Fedora 14 will be announced next week and developers will quickly be turning their attention to this next Red Hat release. The final release of Fedora 14 is tentatively scheduled for release on the 26th of October, but we would be surprised if it is not pushed back into early November per the usual Fedora milestone delays. Fedora 14 is likely to ship with GNOME 3.0, KDE 4.5, the Linux 2.6.35/2.6.36 kernel, GCC 4.5, and X.Org Server 1.9.

The release of Fedora 13 is expected to take place on the 18th of May, barring any last minute delays.