Fedora 10 - A Detailed Discussion on 13 Prime Features

With the success of Fedora in Linux distributions, Fedora 10 is perhaps the most anticipated operating system from their library. A faster and advanced distribution is what is proposed by them. Fedora 10, codenamed Cambridge, is set for release on November 25, 2008. So before you go on and download this new Fedora version, let me give you a detailed idea about what benefits and changes are going to be there in this new Fedora 10.

Features

Fedora has many a projects finished or in the queue for Fedora 10. It is a mammoth and obviously unimportant to take all of them out here. So I have sorted some to best of your interests. If you are a developer, then don’t worry. You have your goodie too.

1. AMQP (Advanced Message Queueing Protocol) Infrastructure

This is perhaps one of the biggest package that  has been implemented to Fedora 10. You must be wondering about AMQP right? AMQP is a technology that makes it easy to build scalable,high-performance enterprise application. Its primary aim is to create an open standard for messaging in order to create open and interoperable messaging. Though the application is not visible to you and as an user you can always question why is it so important, I have some use cases for you who will benefit from AMQP enormously!

• Reliably deliver value bearing messages (fire and forget; you can absolutely trust AMQP to get the message to its destination once receipt is acknowledged by the transport)
• Rapidly deliver status events to a large community (publish sub-event notification)
• File transfer (secure, can be resumed, firewall friendly, and dependable)

I hope now you know about the efficiency of AMQP.

2. Better Printing

Printing and configuring the print set up has always been a problem with open desktops. And Fedora 10 has improved upon just that.

• The configuration tool window is simpler. Double-clicking on a printer opens a properties dialog.
• The list of printers are updated dynamically while the configuration tool is working.
• You can see an individual printer’s job by right clicking and then selecting View Print Queue. Again, you can see all the queued up jobs from all the printers by right clicking on any free space in the folder where you have printers’ icons.
• A diagnose button is there as a troubleshooter if at all your printer gets into trouble.
• Job monitoring tool is also there to display an authentication dialog so that the job can proceed.

So you see there are a lot of subtle facilities that Fedora 10 offers to make your printing experience better.

3. Better and Faster Startup

Fedora 10 developers have intended to make this operating system look shiny and glittery right from when it starts so to do this they are getting rid of RHGB and writing a new program, Plymouth, that starts earlier (even before / is mounted!) and gets pretty graphics. But Systems without driver supports also have a text mode fallback as an alternative.

That might make you a little suspicious about the speed of shutting down and starting up. But don’t worry, Fedora 10 has improved and fast start up now. And they say 30 seconds is all it will take. So happy?

4. Better Remote Support

Fedora becomes easier to use in media-center scenarios where a remote control may come handy. With better LIRC support that helps it easy to connect to remote controls, infra red remote controls will be just fine to work with media applications.

5. Improved PulseAudio

The PulseAudio sound server has been rewritten to use timer-based audio scheduling. With this one Fedora 10 comes at par with Apple and Windows Vista. The main benefits that you are gonna get from this is,

• Less wakeups, reduced power consumption
• Dynamic latency adaption with flexible options.
• Less dependent on audio hardware
• Minimized chance of drop outs

6. First Aid Kit

Well the name may seem funny but it is an automated recovery tool that brings together common recovery processes and applies them to a system. It is more of a plug-in that focuses on focusing on maintaining user data integrity and lets you revert the faulty changes. So that  makes it easier for users to rescue their systems in case of problems. You can either choose Fix whatever is wrong with my system which works as a comprehensive chkdsk or you can select specific process.

7. Kernel Modes Sharing for Graphics

The title itself may disinterest you. But believe me it is not. In words of Fedora

Currently, most graphics modes are initialized during the X server startup. Kernel Modesetting moves this process from the X server’s DDX drivers to the kernel, and it enables several new features including:

• Improved Graphical Boot
• Faster fast user switching
• Seamless X server switching
• Graphical panic messages

So basically fast user switching will be faster and smoother, making Fedora more pleasant for non-technical and casual users. Memory management will be better over all.

8. Remote Virtual Settings

It is another very important feature of Fedora 10. Its more than what meets the eye. This feature enables creating virtual machines on properly configured remote hosts. In other words, users will no longer need to log into individual machines to provision VMs. The system of adding remote connections to virtual manager will be fully automated through polling for connections on the local network.

9. Security Audit

A new security audit system and intrusion detection system will be there. sectool is a security tool that can be used both as a security audit as well as a part of an intrusion detection system. Advanced users can also see the documentation and logs of those test and can use as scripts to repair holes. This is something we will need from Fedora 10 and we hope that it is efficient.

10. Virtual Storage

If you remember, libvirt was introduced by Fedora 8 and became a hit. Here you will no longer eed to directly login to a server providing virtualization capabilities. All common management tasks can be completed remotely using virt-manager. The test plan includes creating a new guest OS and associate it with some storage. It is fabulous, no?

Goodies for Developers

I had promised at the start that there will be goodies too for developers in this article. Here are three most important features of Fedora 10 which are bound to attract you .

1. Appliance Tools

Tools for building virtual appliances have also been a focus for Fedora 10. This consists of an ACT (Appliance Creation Tool) and and the AOS (The Appliance Operating System). Let me quote Fedora here once again

ACT (Appliance Creation Tool)

• Enables you to build a fedora based appliance.
• Enables you to build a pre-installed multi partitioned disk! that is great!

AOS (The Appliance Operating System)

• Provides a template for developers who want to build a fedora based appliance.
• Provides a customized OS. I mean, you can start from the least resources (the minimum of what an OS needs, remember Just Enough from ubuntu?) and add whatever you want. This is really flexible from Fedora.
• It also allows developers to kick the tires of the AOS without having to build it from scratch.

2. NetBeans IDE

Are you a developer? Then I don’t really need to give a formal introduction to the topic here. Fedora 10 users Netbeans for two ways basically.

• Easy and rapid way to organize environment for development of systems that can be based on modern technologies and popular programming languages.
• a way for development of applications based on the NetBeans Platform. All the tools required for development of the Rich Client Swing Applications are included in the IDE.

3. Eclipse 3.4

Eclipse is said to be one of the most influential work-areas in Linux distributions. So this time developers have kept that in mind and tried to make Eclipse is fast as possible for compiling Java code in the future. As well, a new feature called Plug-in Spy has been added which is a useful tool for plug-in developers to determine what plug-in supplies a selection class. I hope Eclipse 3.4 is as advanced as it is proposed.

Conclusion

Inspite of all these, the Feodra 10 excels in EFI, Evdev Input driver, Python Bindings, Better webcam facilities and etc. The idea of Fedora 10 is to be as flexible and rich as possible serving both the worlds of developers and common users. With no notable glitches at sight (actually I don’t want to comment unless I see the final version), Fedora 10 promises to be one of the finest operating systems of Linux distribution. do not forget to give us your feedback.