Fedora 11

Fedora 11 Release Features
(downloads are at the bottom of the page)

As always, Fedora continues to develop (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions) and integrate the latest free and open source software (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features). The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are included in Fedora 11, refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList Throughout the release cycle, there are interviews with the developers behind key features giving out the inside story: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews The following are major features for Fedora 11:

• Automatic font and mime-type installation - PackageKit was introduced in Fedora 9 as a cross-distro software management application for users. The capabilities it offers thanks to integration with the desktop became more visible in Fedora 10, where it provided automatic codec installation. Now in Fedora 11, PackageKit extends this functionality with the ability to automatically install fonts where needed for viewing and editing documents. It also includes the capability to install handlers for specific content types as needed. Some work is still being completed to provide automatic installation of applications.
• Volume Control - Currently, people using Fedora have to go through many levels of mixers in different applications to properly set up sound sources. These are all exposed in the volume control on the desktop, making for a very confusing user experience. PulseAudio allows us to unify the volume controls in one interface that makes setting up sound easier and more pain-free.
• Intel, ATI and Nvidia kernel modsetting - Fedora 10 provided the first steps by a major distribution into using the kernel modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. We indicated at the time that we would be adding greater support for additional video cards as time went on. KMS originally was featured only on some ATI cards. In Fedora 11, this work is extended to include many more video cards, including Intel and Nvidia, and additional ATI as well. Although not fully complete, we have increased enormously the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with more to come.
• Fingerprint - Extensive work has been done to make fingerprint readers easy to use as an authentication mechanism. Currently, using fingerprint readers is a bit of a pain, and installing/using fprint and its pam module take more time than should ever be necessary. The goal of this feature is to make it painless by providing all the required pieces in Fedora, together with nicely integrated configuration. To enable this functionality the user will register their fingerprints on the system as part of user account creation. After doing so, they will easily be able to log in and authenticate seamlessly using a simple finger swipe. This greatly simplifies one element of identity management and is a great step in the evolution of the linux desktop.
• IBus input method system - ibus has been rewritten in C and is the new default input method for Asian languages. It allows input methods to be added and removed dynamically during a desktop session. It supports Chinese (pinyin, libchewing, tables), Indic (m17n), Japanese (anthy), Korean (libhangul), and more. There are still some features missing compared to scim so testing is strongly encouraged and reports of problems and suggestions for improvements welcome.
• Presto - Normally when you update a package in Fedora, you download an entire replacement package. Most of the time (especially for the larger packages), most of the actual data in the updated package is the same as the original package, but you still end up downloading the full package. Presto allows you to download the difference (called the delta) between the package you have installed and the one you want to update to. This can reduce the download size of updates by 60% – 80%. It is not enabled by default for this release. To make use of this feature you must install the yum-presto plugin with yum install yum-presto.