Fedora 11 battles into beta

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Apr 2009 at 11:08

Fedora 11, codenamed Leonidas, has been pushed into beta, bringing with it a feature list that "dwarfs any previous release."

As with the recently released Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope beta, the Fedora Project has placed a lot of emphasis on support and quick booting and shutdown.

Release notes claim that a PC running Leonidas should hit the login screen in around 20 seconds, which is an impressive considering its predecessor was around 10 seconds slower and still felt fairly swift.

This has been achieved, in part, thanks to the rejigging of the Plymouth boot tool which now makes better use of Nvidia, ATI, and Intel video adapters.

Desktop users are being offered a choice of the latest desktop environments, with Gnome 2.26, KDE 4.2 and Xfce 4.6 beta all on offer.

Other under-the-hood changes include the default use of the Ext4 file system, Btrfs support, and enhancements to the PackageKit package manager which automatically roots out and installs the necessary codecs and fonts when it encounters a new file type.

The Fedora Project claims Leonidas has already proved a hit, with downloads of the alpha topping 40,000 in its first month.

Anybody who's interested in giving Fedora 11 beta a whirl can grab it from here. If you're not interested in overwriting your existing OS, Fedora 11 a live image can be burned to a CD or USB stick and run off that instead.