More Troubles For Vista: Fedora 10

The latest version of the free operating system is here. While Vista is almost an year old, GNU/Linux-based operating systems keep getting better and better.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, has announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous leading-edge technologies and continues to lay the groundwork for derivative open source distributions throughout the enterprise.

Fedora 10, the 10th release in five years, features substantial virtualisation improvements for remote installation and management of storage provisioning. These features will make system administration of virtual machine hosts and guests easier and more capable of automation, especially as they are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, Fedora 10 includes NetworkManager connection sharing, allowing laptop users with an Ethernet or mobile broadband connection to provide Internet routing to others through the laptop wireless interface, for instant collaboration anywhere, anytime.

Fedora 10 includes the premiere of a new graphical boot system called Plymouth, designed to speed up the boot process by taking advantage of a new kernel mode setting feature. Plymouth was designed by Fedora contributors and targeted primarily at ATI cards, but will be expanded in the future to support a broader range of media cards. Fedora 10 also features increased hardware support for a vast array of webcams and better handling of printers via both direct physical connections and networks. Further, PackageKit, a software management tool that originally debuted in Fedora 9, has been extended in this release to provide on-demand codec software installation.

According to Linux Format magazine's review of the OS, "The first thing you'll notice is the vast increase in boot up speed thanks to the implementation of Plymouth - the replacement for the ageing and increasingly fragile RHGB. Along with the improvement in speed, the general look and feel of the initial boot process feels a lot smoother thanks to work done to minimise all the different hand overs between the BIOS, GRUB, RHGB and finally a smooth fade into the GDM login screen.

"Fedora volunteer contributors and Red Hat engineers worked together to develop the cutting-edge features found in Fedora 10. Their widespread appeal, combined with Fedora's policy of collaborating with upstream free software communities, means that many of these features will be found in other Linux distributions in the future," said Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat.

Fedora 10 also enhances its commitment to security with a new security auditing and detection toolkit called SecTool, and a brand-new set of Python bindings that allow programmers to use the FIPS-140 validated NSS library for rapid development of secure applications. The distribution also extends the Live USB persistence feature that was pioneered in Fedora 9, adding support for a separate user data area with optional encryption for the ultimate experience in secure, portable computing. Amongst the many new and enhanced features, Fedora 10 includes the all-new OpenOffice.org 3.0 and GNOME 2.24.1, for maximum desktop productivity and ease of use; a rewritten audio system for faster response and lower power usage; a full set of appliance building tools; and support for more hardware than any other operating system.