Well we are here again, awoken by the loud trumpet from a land so far away only the pure in heart could reach it. Fedora 17 Alpha has been announced and is currently available for download and testing.
The new release goes by the code name Meaty Miracle and provides a preview of the great features that will be available when it reaches Release status. In summary this is your peek into the future of Fedora 17. The system is currently available for interested persons who would like to help test and suggest improvements to the Fedora project.
What is Alpha release?
The Alpha release contains all the wonderful features in Fedora 17 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing guided by the QA team at Fedora helps the Development team at Fedora target and identify bugs within the Fedora operating system. When the bugs have been caught and fixed, the next release will be the Beta release which will have a resemblance to the full release after complete testing has been done. The release date for Fedora 17 has been announced for May.
Available Improvements for Users
- GIMP has been updated to 2.8 release, with an abundant list of new features, such as the long awaited single window mode, layer groups, and on-canvas text editing
- Improved language and font support
- Improved Desktop Managers. Whether you like GNOME, KDE, Sugar, or otherwise, they have all been updated to the latest of their respective versions.
Available Improvements for Systems Administrators
- Improvement in clustering stack
- Load balancing and high availability improvements
- JBoss Application Server (AS) 7 has been added to allow you deploy full Java EE Applications
- Abundance of virtualization features
For developers, there are new programming languages added to the Fedora platform as well as updates of the current language popular development languages like Java 7, Ruby 1.9.3 , PHP 5.4. Other development updates are: GCC 4.7, Opa programming language, Erlang and improvements in the Haskell platform.
Links and Sources: Release announcement | Latest Download
