Fedora 12 in Alpha
An Alpha version of the new Fedora, codenamed Constantine and scheduled for release in November, is now available for download.
Among the many important changes in the new version are GRUB support for the file system Ext4 and a switch from Gzip to LZMA by RPM package compression, allowing faster downloads and reducing mirror space. The i686 version has also been optimized for Intel Atom processors.
The announcement by Jesse Keating contains details of more changes:
- Improved web cam support
- Empathy replaces Pidgin as default messenger
- Gnome 2.28 beta and KDE 4.3
- 3G support for the network manager
- Current version of Ogg Theora "Thusnelda"
- Improvements to PackageKit and the Pulseaudio sound system.
- Better power management
Fedora 12 also contains a bug reporting tool that automatically sends error reports to the Fedora Project when the system crashes.
A complete overview of the planned new features, along with release notes to the current version can be found on the Fedora wiki. Download: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease.