[PLUG] Announcing the release of Fedora 13 Beta!!

[Rahul Sundaram]

The countdown is on: Fedora 13, "Goddard," is set to launch in mid-May.
Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating system that
continues to deliver innovative features to users worldwide, with a new
release every six months.

But wait! What's that? You can't wait a whole month to try out the
latest and greatest in Fedora's leading-edge technologies? You want to
be the first to see what's new? Well, you're in luck. The Fedora 13 Beta
release is available NOW. Hop on board and take a tour of the rocking
new features.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease?anF13b

What is the Beta Release? The beta release is the last important
milestone of Fedora 13. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as
updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 13, scheduled to be
released in the middle of May. We invite you to join us and participate
in making Fedora 13 a solid release by downloading, testing, and
providing your valuable feedback.

Of course, this is a beta release, some problems may still be lurking. A
list of the problems we already know about is found at the Common F13
bugs page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs

If you find a bug that's not found on that page, be sure it gets fixed
before release by reporting your discovery at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/. Thank you!

A universe of new features for end users:

      * Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and
        PackageKit for automatic installation of printer drivers, so
        when you plug in a printer, Fedora will automatically offer to
        install drivers for it if needed.

      * Desktop enhancements. The Shotwell photo manager, Deja-dup
        backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client, and Simple Scan
        scanning utility are all delivered by default to provide a
        enhanced desktop experience out of the box.

      * NetworkManager improvements include better Mobile Broadband,
        Bluetooth, and new CLI abilities. NetworkManager is now a
        one-stop-shop for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it
        dial-up, broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. Mobile broadband
        enhancements now show signal strength. Old-style dial-up
        networking (DUN) over Bluetooth has also been added. And now,
        you can even use NetworkManager from the command line in
        addition to the improved graphical user interface. Getting a
        connection when you need it has never been easier to figure out,
        whether you're at home, at work, at the local coffee shop, or
        riding your city's wi-fi enabled public transport.

      * Color management. Do you like your printouts to look the same as
        they do on screen - or your scanner output to look the same as
        what you just scanned? Color Management allows you to better set
        and control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners,
        through the gnome-color-manager package.

      * Enhanced iPod functionality. Newer Apple iPod, iPod Touch and
        iPhone models are supported by some of your favorite photo
        management software, and music library applications such as
        Rhythmbox. The devices are automatically attached using the
        libimobiledevice library, so you can work with your content more
        easily.

      * Experimental 3D graphics support extended to free Nouveau driver
        for NVidia cards. In this release we are one step closer to
        having 3D graphics supported on completely free and open source
        software (FOSS) drivers. Fedora 12 saw the enabling of a number
        of ATI cards; this time around, we've added a wide range of
        NVidia cards to our list of liberated video capabilities. You
        can install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package to try out
        the work in progress.

      * DisplayPort support improvements - Fedora 12 added initial
        support for the new DisplayPort display connector for Intel
        graphics chips. Support for Nvidia and ATI systems have now have
        added in this release.

      * Experimental user management interface. The user account tool
        has been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and
        accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to
        configure personal information, make a personal profile picture
        or icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options
        for your Fedora system. Try out the work in progress.

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

      * SystemTap static probes. SystemTap now has expanded capabilities
        to monitor higher-level language runtimes like Java, Python, and
        Tcl, and also user space applications, starting with PostgreSQL.
        In the future, Fedora will add support for even more user space
        applications, greatly increasing the scope and power of
        monitoring for application developers.

      * Easier Python debugging. We've added new support that allows
        developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in
        Fedora to get more complete information when debugging with gdb,
        making Fedora an exceptional platform for powerful, rapid
        application development.

      * Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable
        Python 3 stack will help programmers write and test code for use
        in both Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, so you can
        future-proof your applications now using Fedora.

      * NetBeans Java EE 6 support. The NetBeans 6.8 integrated
        development environment is the first IDE to offer complete
        support for the entire Java EE 6 specification.

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

      * boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO). BFO allows users to download a
        single, tiny image (could fit on a floppy) and install current
        and future versions of Fedora without having to download
        additional images.

      * System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded
        features for logging into managed domains, including caching for
        offline authentication. How does this help the sysadmin? This
        means, for example, users on laptops can still login when
        disconnected from the company's managed network. The
        authentication configuration tool in Fedora has already been
        updated to support SSSD, and work is underway to make it even
        more attractive and functional.

      * Pioneering NFS features. Fedora offers the latest version 4 of
        the NFS protocol for better performance, and, in conjunction
        with recent kernel modifications, includes IPv6 support for NFS
        as well.

      * Zarafa Groupware - Alternative to Microsoft Exchange. Zarafa now
        makes available a complete Open Source groupware suite that can
        be used as a drop-in Exchange replacement for Web-based mail,
        calendaring, collaboration, and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP
        and iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the
        ability to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full
        set of programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel
        using modern Ajax technologies.

      * Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating
        lightweight filesystem snapshots that can be mounted (and booted
        into) selectively. The created snapshots are copy-on-write
        snapshots, so there is no file duplication overhead involved for
        files that do not change between snapshots. It allows developers
        to feel comfortable experimenting with new software without fear
        of an unusable install -- automated snapshots allow them to
        easily revert to the previous day's filesystem.

      * Dogtag Certificate System It is an enterprise-class open source
        Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate
        lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smartcard
        management. Brought into the fold as part of the Red Hat
        acquisition of Netscape technologies, this certificate server is
        fully free and open source and now included in Fedora.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all
the new features onboard Fedora 13 is available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/

Contributing For more information including common and known bugs, tips
on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer
to the release notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help
translate software and content, test and give feedback on software
updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of
promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of
Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit
http://join.fedoraproject.org today!

-- 

Rahul

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