What's new in Fedora 12

Red Hat announced the next version of Fedora scheduled to be released on 17th Nov 09, which is codenamed “Constantine”. There is nice history behind this name. Constantine was the Emperor who brought christian religion to the Roman Empire likewise Fedora 12 will bring Linux Religion to masses. In this article I will talk about some of the new features of Fedora 12. Some of these were targeted at Leonidas(Fedora 11) but were pushed back to Fedora 12.

Virtualization

Red Hat has been leading on the virtualization front, earlier realeases of Fedora were first to introduce libvirt and Virtual Manager, A lot of new virtualization improvements can again be seen in this release of  Fedora. Added liblvm, a user space library for application interface to LVM.

Empathy, default IM client

Fedora developers are thinking of replacing Pidgin IM with Empathy as the default Gnome messenger. But there are mixed views about it(check this link). Since, empathy is going to be the default IM in Ubuntu Karmic, Fedora developers might want to wait and see how empathy performs and then include it in the next Fedora releases.

Empathy has audio and video support for multiple protocols(XMPP, SIP and MSN). But since Fedora should follow the latest trends it is a fair chance that empathy will be included in Constantine.

Mobile Broadband and IPv6 support in Network Manager

Extended support of mobile broadband cards in NetworkManager, including display of signal strength when connected, network scanning, network selection.

Full support for IPv6 and system-wide connections in the Network Manager have been added.

Improved power management

A new daemon tuned was introduced in Fedora 11. This time developers have thought to merge it with another daemon developed for RHEL 5 called ktune. New and easy switching among various predefined and extendible tuning settings is also introduced.

This will increase the overall Power Management performance. On an average less power will be consumed for turned on systems without affecting user experience.

Latest Desktop Environments

The latest Desktop Environments will be shipped with the new release of Fedora. Gnome 2.28 and KDE 4.3 will be there.

Both of the Desktop Environments have a lot of new and improved features. Its surely going to be a great experience with them.

Better webcam support 

Out of the box support for a lot of new webcams has been extended further than ever. The ground work was already done in the Fedora 10 and with the help of a library (libv4l) various proprietary video formats have been decompressed, and almost all the web cam using applications have been patched to use this library.

Improved PackageKit

We can now install application through web browsers with packagekit-browser-plugin which is a safe and quick way to install packages rather than telling users to run different installation commands.

A packagekit-command-not-found plugin has also been added that installs a handler in bash which suggests a package in case of missing commands and correct invalid commands.

More Highlights

Linux Kernel 2.6.31 RC, Improved KVM virtualization. Bluetooth SOD (Service On Demand), NetBeans 6.7, PHP 5.3.0, Eclipse 3.5.0 are some of the default features that you will get out of the box. .