Fedora 10 boosts boot times

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 25 Nov 2008 at 17:13

Fedora 10 has finally been released, bringing a host of subtle improvements and new features to the open-source operating system.

The latest release of Fedora was delayed by three weeks, but users have been treated to a selection of significant new features.

Principal among them is the introduction of the networking manager previously seen in Ubuntu 8.10, allowing users to detect and connect to 3G networks from the same panel they use to manage Wi-Fi connections.

The team has also implemented the new "glitch-free" PulseAudio sound system, which should significantly boost the reliability and capabilities of the Fedora audio stack.

Fedora 10 also sees the old Red Hat graphical boot shoved aside in favour of the Plymouth boot tool, which the team claim can improve boot times by about 10%.

Alongside Plymouth, users can also look forward to support for the Gnome 2.24 desktop environment, which brings tabbed browsing to the Nautilus file manager, and replaces the Pidgin instant messaging client with the Empathy framework. Empathy is designed to offer much tighter desktop integration, though it was skipped in the last Ubuntu release.

PackageKit has also been looked at, and will now automatically root out codecs when the user tries to play unsupported Media Formats.

Bundled software hasn't been neglected, with Firefox and OpenOffice both moving to version 3. There's also all the usual Fedora stalwarts, including the ever-reliable GIMP image editor.

Download Fedora 10 here.

We recently spent a week with Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10, find out how it went here.