Fedora 11 alpha makes appearance

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 10 Feb 2009 at 09:50

The Fedora Project has put out the first alpha of Fedora 11, the latest version of the popular Linux distro.

Codenamed Leonidas, the most noticeable change for the average user is the Project's continuing quest to bring boot times down.

Fedora 10 was already pretty snappy, opening in around 30 seconds on most systems, however for Leonidas the team are looking at bringing that down to only 20 seconds.

This will be achieved thanks to further reworking of the Plymouth boot tool, which made its debut in Fedora 10, shoving aside the old Red Hat graphic boot.

Desktop users are being offered a choice of the latest desktop environments, with the Gnome 2.26 development snapshot, KDE 4.2 RC2 and Xfce 4.6 beta all on offer. Other under-the-hood changes include the default use of the Ext4 file system, Btrfs support, a new volume control and PackageKit support for firmware on demand.

The release notes describe the alpha as a "sanatised snapshot" of development, but the usual caveats are in place.

"The software is going to have bugs, problems, and incomplete features," the notes admit. "It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could."

Download the alpha here.

We recently spent a week with Fedora and Ubuntu. Find out how we got on here.