Fedora 11 First Beta
The Fedora project has released the first beta test version of Fedora 11 after an announced delay from its original milestone.
The Fedora 11 beta contains all the features planned for the final release, and there are quite a few. Beside GNOME 2.26 and KDE 4.2, the distro immediately includes two somewhat controversial changes in the form of the ext4 filesystem and Nouveau drivers. The Anaconda installation program also experienced numerous enhancements where developers completely rewrote the storage handling code.
The new Fedora should handle package downloads more quickly through the deltarpms familiar to OpenSUSE users. Fedora calls the plug-in for yum Presto, where Fedora should start in about 20 seconds on the GNOME desktop. As always, the beta is not yet ready for production systems.
The full list of new features and enhancements are here. Downloads are available here. The final version of Fedora 11 is still targeted for May 26, 2009.