Last week brought an early holiday present to many open source enthusiasts and technology consumers with the release of Fedora 12. Every six months the anticipation builds as I look forward to taking the latest version of Fedora for a test drive and trying out all of the new features and enhancements. After just a few days with Fedora 12 I’m already impressed with the feature set and polish in this release.

I’ve installed Fedora 12 on one of my laptops and also on a Dell mini netbook. First off, I really like the artwork in Fedora 12 and the new theme with the rays of light looks great. The Fedora Design Team continues to impress me with the new graphics and imagery they create for each release. Beyond that, everything just feels better and more comfortable, and the extra attention to detail all around the desktop really pays off.

I installed Fedora 12 from a USB key and the process was flawless and the fastest I’ve experienced yet with Fedora. The boot time was also very quick – even on my netbook. I’m excited to see Fedora’s support for the Moblin Core desktop environment in Fedora 12. This is my first experience with Moblin and I’m looking forward to putting in more time to test it out. Fedora continues to show the flexibility and functionality of free software and its impressive coverage of mini systems and netbooks with the inclusion of Moblin in Fedora 12.

Another feature in Fedora 12 that I’m happy to see is the improved webcam support. My webcam just works with Fedora 12.

Fedora 12 also includes several new virtualization features such as libguestfs that I look forward to trying out.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects including Fedora. This model enables Red Hat to deliver superior technology, faster, and with resulting products that are better suited to customer requirements. I thank the Fedora community for its continued hard work and congratulate them on yet another solid release. I encourage everyone to download Fedora 12 today and take it for a spin: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.

In previous Fedora 12 spotlight blogs we’ve highlighted SystemTap and desktop enhancements. Fedora 12 also includes a number of virtualization improvements, from better virtual disk performance and storage discovery to hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption and a modern network booting infrastructure. For a more in-depth look, read the collection of interviews here with members of the Fedora community who have worked directly on the many virtualization improvements in Fedora 12.

Libguestfs and guestfish make their debut in Fedora 12 and continue Fedora’s long-standing leadership in making it easier for system administrators to manage virtual machines. Libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying the disk images of virtual machines. In combination with guestfish, the libguestfs interactive shell replaces the old and cumbersome methods of accessing guest disk images — creating loopback mounts as root, using kpartx, and reconfiguring LVM. The libguestfs feature lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without any of these steps, and without booting those guests.

New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable and easy to manage solutions. In Fedora 12, administrators can now choose to use huge page backed memory to reduce memory consumption and improve performance by reducing CPU cache pressure, retain VM hardware profiles across qemu upgrades, add network interfaces to a KVM guest without restarting, and enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage and issue NPIV operations.

Several changes have been introduced to QEMU/KVM virtual machines in an effort to improve host security in the event of a flaw in the QEMU binary, and the deprecated etherboot PXE booting infrastructure has been replaced by gPXE. Fedora 12 also features improvements in the I/O performance of virtual machines using the qcow2 disk format, as well as improved tools for interface configuration.

Check out the video below, where Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields talks about a few of the Fedora 12 virtualization features with Red Hat’s Chris Wright, principal software engineer, and Hugh Brock, manager, Software Engineering.

With just a few days until the anticipated release of Fedora 12 we’re continuing our blog series on new features with a spotlight on desktop enhancements. We’ll just hit a few highlights on Fedora 12 desktop features in this blog, so if you’d like more in-depth information, be sure to check out this interview with Matthias Clasen. Matthias is a principal software engineer at Red Hat who works on the Desktop team and is also the upstream maintainer of GLib and GTK+.

NetworkManager was introduced in Fedora 7, and it has been polished release after release to provide greater usability, and is now designed to take advantage of other desktop improvements as well. In Fedora 12, NetworkManager provides comprehensive support for mobile broadband, and enhancements in the way Bluetooth and NetworkManager work together also deliver an improved experience for tethering to a supported Bluetooth-capable phone. If you’re always on the go, we believe that Fedora 12 will make it easier to be online using mobile broadband.

For users who want enhanced social experiences, Fedora 12 offers improved webcam support. Empathy, an instant messaging application that is part of the GNOME desktop, is also available in Fedora 12. It supports multiple IM protocols along with IRC, SIP (voice-over-IP) calling, and video chat. Empathy is built on top of a flexible communication framework called Telepathy, which makes it easier to integrate collaboration and communication features with the rest of the desktop. As Matthias explains, “One small glimpse of this is already visible with the ability to share your desktop with your chat contacts. We also hope to see rich integration with GNOME Shell in the future.”

In addition to individual features, Fedora 12 includes many small improvements that when combined, deliver a more enjoyable and friendly desktop experience. Here are just a few of those finishing touches that Matthias pointed out:

• Reduced visual noise by eliminated icons in menus and buttons
• Updated look and positioning of tooltips
• Improved font rendering and hinting
• Reduced frequency and updated visual appearance of notification bubbles
• Improved personalization of backgrounds by adding an easy way to get more backgrounds online

Can’t wait until the final release of Fedora 12? Download the Fedora 12 Beta here to try out the new desktop features today – and remember to update your system to the latest software and then reboot for best results. Interested in the entire list of improvements and innovations in Fedora 12? You’ll find the full feature list and details on the Fedora wiki.

Check out what the Fedora community is saying as the countdown to Fedora 12 continues. Follow Planet Fedora on twitter here: http://twitter.com/planetfedora.

There are plenty of new features slated for Fedora 12 and we’ll be featuring just a few over the next few weeks in our spotlight feature blog series. Enhancements to SystemTap should delight developers and system administrators. Here are just a few of the reasons why we love SystemTap — be sure to check out a more in-depth overview and podcast on SystemTap here.

Red Hat’s Will Cohen, a performance tools engineer and SystemTap developer, best sums up SystemTap in stating: “Being able to modify and instrument code to understand what is going on in open source is cool, but having to recompile the code and restart machine to run that modified code isn’t so cool. SystemTap provides infrastructure to simplify that instrumentation process. It allows developers and system administrators to instrument the kernel and user space programs without the need to recompile, restart or even stop your program or system. They can observe what is happening without having to stop or interrupt anything.”

SystemTap 1.0, which is part of Fedora 12, brings at least three significant sets of improvements. First, it includes a variety of new features, such as the ability to take advantage of kernel tracepoints, extended support for C++ code, and a set of static probe markers programmers can include in their code to make tracing easier. If supporting debugging information or “debuginfo” isn’t installed on the system, the newest versions of SystemTap even suggest the command needed to get the appropriate debuginfo RPM installed. Developers are currently at work making that debuginfo more compact, and we expect to see that feature in a future Fedora release, supported fully by SystemTap. » Read more

The Fedora Project’s latest release Fedora 12 – codename “Constantine” – is anticipated to be released in November. Much like its namesake Constantine, Fedora 12 is ready to unite with a feature set that includes plenty for everyone!

Fedora 12 is expected to include numerous enhancements and features added since the release of Fedora 11 in June 2009, such as these:

• PackageKit has grown the ability to automatically install the software packages that provide new commands when the user is operating a text terminal. It also now supports a browser plugin that allows software vendors of any size to provide automatic installation of software packages using simple HTML object tags.
• Enhancements to NetworkManager to make both system-wide connections and mobile broadband connections easier than ever. Signal strength and network selection are available for choosing the best mobile broadband connection when you’re on the road. And if you’re at a system that requires an always-on connection or static addressing, NetworkManager now is designed to allow you to configure that connection directly from the desktop, and includes PolicyKit integration so configuration management can be done via central policy where needed.
• For several years, the open, free Ogg Theora format has provided a way for freedom-loving users to share video. Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, which achieves near-H.264 quality in a completely free and open codec and format. (A detailed and highly technical status report can be found here.) With the introduction of Theora 1.1, we believe that the quality of free video will meet or exceed user expectations, delivering crisp, vibrant media in both streaming and downloadable form.
• New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable, and easy to manage solutions. The newest features include better memory and performance management, hot network adapter changes, discovery of SAN storage, improved virtual disk image performance, a newer PXE boot infrastructure, and the new libguestfs library and guestfish shell to allow highly automated manipulation of virtual machines outside the virtualization environment.

We encourage everyone to download the Beta and take it for a spin. Let us know what you think and be sure to report any issues with the Beta to help Fedora improve the final release. Anyone can download the Beta as an installation medium or a Live image to try it on their system. Check it out today by downloading here.

The weather is getting colder and leaves are changing color in the northern hemisphere, signaling the start of fall. Much to our delight, this also means that the latest version of Fedora is expected to be available soon! Released approximately every six months (generally around May Day and Halloween), Fedora 12 is expected to be loaded with new feature functionality and continue to advance free and open source software and content.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects, including the Fedora Project, which produces the Fedora distribution. Fedora combines and showcases the latest in open source technologies anyone can download, use, and remix, and also serves as the technology foundation of Red Hat’s commercial products. By providing cutting-edge technology, Fedora helps advance the development of open source worldwide, and the technologies found in Fedora may be incorporated later into other Linux distributions as well.

Ever wonder how great features make it from the community into enterprise-ready technology like Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Take a look at the below video to learn more.

There are many features that started in Fedora and are now included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. PackageKit and PolicyKit are two prime examples. PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software easier, through a set of easy-to-use command-line and graphical utilities. It also integrates software management with desktop activities like clicking on packages or entering commands in a terminal. PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling the rules by which unprivileged processes can speak to privileged processes. It also provides a framework for centralizing these access policies for use in managed environments.

PolicyKit first debuted in Fedora 8, and PackageKit in Fedora 9, and have been refined upstream thanks to the wide exposure they receive first in Fedora. They are expected to debut in a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release where customers will also benefit from these refinements.

We’re counting down the weeks until Fedora 12 is released. Keep your eyes peeled for a series of blogs highlighting some of the cool features we anticipate in Fedora 12.

We want to thank all of the attendees who took part in this year’s co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Chicago! The event was a success and we hope all attendees enjoyed learning about the latest open source developments. The Summit and JBoss World might be over, but Red Hat is still in full motion in September. Check out where you can find us the rest of September around the world!

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

For a full calendar of Fedora events, click here.

North America

Fedora will have a booth at LinuxCon, Sept. 21-23 in Portland, Oregon. LinuxCon brings together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. Several Red Hat associates will be delivering sessions during the event, check out the session agenda here.

Visit the Fedora booth at Ohio Linux Fest, Sept. 25-26 in Columbus, Ohio. Created for the Free and Open Source software communities, this conference features talks by authoritative speakers, a large expo, tutorials and more.

Red Hat President & CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will deliver a talk on September 29 at 6:00 p.m. ET at NC State University’s College of Computer Science. Whitehurst will share his vision of how the open source model is meeting the IT demands of today and providing a means for developing and solving problems faster, better and at a lower cost. Located in Room 1231 at EBII on NC State’s Centennial Campus, this talk is free to attend and open to the public. Please click here for more information.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

Fedora will have a booth at OpenExpo 2009, Sept. 23-24 in Winterthur, Switzerland. OpenExpo 2009 offers direct contact with the people behind the world’s best free projects, along with informative lectures and hands-on demonstrations. For more information, click here.

For information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

For information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.

Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com.

At the recent Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Berlin, held alongside the LinuxTag 2009 event, over 150 attendees gathered to teach, learn, and collaborate on subjects ranging from systems management best practices to user interface design. Attendees included developers, translators, security professionals, designers, and system administrators from around the globe and the Fedora community. The three-day event included two days of development featuring group-driven brainstorming, code sprints, and lecture sessions; and a dedicated day of over thirty technical and educational talks, in which the schedule and proceedings were organized directly on site by the participants themselves.

One group attending the FUDCon event was the Red Hat Security Response Team, which is made up of employees from eight different countries. During the event they collaborated on procedural revisions and were able to discuss current security issues of interest. FUDCon also hosted a Linux wireless mini-summit, attended by over a dozen upstream Linux developers representing various kernel wireless LAN driver and infrastructure component communities, related user applications, hardware vendors, and Fedora and other Linux distribution communities. The face-to-face involvement of hardware vendors helped expose the need for specific testing mode extensions. The group also explored the impact of current standards activities on Linux thanks to the attendance of a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 standards body. Finally, during the technical sessions, the group presented tutorial material that would allow contributors to participate in developing and improving open source wireless drivers.

You can’t put it better than Linux kernel wireless LAN maintainer and Red Hat engineer John Linville, who said, after the event: “Keeping these people working well together is key to further improvements and successful maintenance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and the rest of the Linux community.”

Among the many speakers at FUDCon:

• Byte-Code solution architect Francesco Crippa and Red Hat’s 2008 RHCE of the Year award winner Jeroen van Meeuwen delivered a mini-track of topics on systems management using Cobbler, Koan, Puppet, Func, and Symbolic.
• Chitlesh Goorah conducted several sessions on the Fedora Electronics Lab and the future of low-cost, high-TCO open source tools in technical verticals.
• Fedora Engineering Manager Tom Callaway spoke on a variety of open source licensing and other legal issues.

To learn more about the proceedings in Berlin, FUDCon, and the Fedora Project, visit the Fedora Project wiki page for FUDCon Berlin 2009, at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009.

Advancements and enhancements are being made every day in many key areas of virtualization technologies. The Fedora Project is on the cutting edge and Fedora 11 showcases recent enhancements to virtualization technology that focus in on management, performance and security.

Fedora 11 includes many new features, one of which is a redesign of ‘virt-manager’; an end-to-end desktop UI for managing virtual machines. The ‘virt-manager’ feature allows the user to focus more on managing virtual machines and less on the backend, no matter what type of virtualization technology they are using. The new features within “virt-manager” include:

• a new VM creation wizard,

• improved support for host-to-host migration of VMs,

• an interface for physical device assignment for existing VMs, easing allocation of physical resources tied to VMs,

• an upgraded statistics display that shows fine grained disk and network I/O stats, and

• improved VNC authentication to connect to VMs, which allow clients to securely connect to remote VMs.

You can learn more about this innovative new tool at http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/.
» Read more

I’d like to think I’m pretty tech savvy for a CEO and have always been an early adopter of the latest and greatest tech innovations. It comes as no shock to those who know me well that I spent yesterday evening taking Fedora 11 for a test drive. I’m not ashamed to admit that I count down the days until the latest release of Fedora comes out with the same level of anticipation that my kids have when they know their birthday is coming up soon. As the title of this blog notes, one word sums up my Fedora 11 experience – wow!!!

There is so much to be excited about from improved virtualization to ext4. The latest enhancements were apparent before I even ran Fedora 11. The downloading experience was the fastest I’ve seen on the first day for previous releases. And, Fedora 11 is so easy to install that even my non-techy CEO counterparts could run Fedora 11 with ease.

On the theme of speed, I installed Fedora 11 on a pretty old machine at home and the boot is amazing. It’s almost too fast — I didn’t get a chance to fully enjoy the new graphics during boot! I’ve also installed Fedora 11 on a HP2133 netbook. It works great and handles fonts on a small screen beautifully.

Several of the advances in Fedora 11 are “under the hood” and I look forward to (and my wife is dreading) this weekend, when I can spend more time trying out Fedora 11.

Fedora continues to do a great job of fulfilling its role as a community R&D lab, and Red Hat as a major contributor benefits immensely from each new release of Fedora. Community participation is a bedrock principle of how Red Hat works, and directly equates to our increased ability to focus on the work that is vital for our customers.

Thank you to the entire Fedora community for a fantastic new release!