Download Fedora 18

The Linux distribution Fedora has arrived at version 18. Fedora is the non-commercial successor to Red Hat Linux, which has been targeting the enterprise market since 2003 as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora ships with the Gnome desktop environment by default, but versions with MATE, Cinnamon, KDE, and Xfce are also available. The most notable improvements made in version 18 ‘Spherical Cow’ are listed below.

For desktop users

Moooove about, stale desktops. We’ve got a small herd of choices udderly suited to your preferences.

• GNOME 3.6 The newest version of the GNOME desktop provides an enhanced Messaging Tray, support for Microsoft Exchange and Skydrive, and many more new features. For more information, visit the GNOME release notes.
• Cinnamon Fedora users now have the option of using Cinnamon, an advanced desktop environment based on GNOME 3. Cinnamon takes advantage of advanced features provided by the GNOME backend while providing users with a more traditional desktop experience.
• MATE Desktop The MATE desktop provides users with a classic GNOME 2.x style user interface. This desktop is perfect for users who have been running GNOME Classic or other window managers like XFCE as an alternative to GNOME 3.
• KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 KDE Plasma Workspaces has been updated with many new features and improved stability and performance, including updates to the Dolphin File Manager, Konsole, and KWin Window manager.
• Xfce 4.10 The lightweight and easy-to-use Xfce desktop has been updated to the 4.10 version with many bug fixes and enhancements, including a new MIME type editor, a reworked xfce4-run dialog, improved mouse settings, tabs in the Thunar file manager , and options to tile windows in xfwm4. Through all of these and more, Xfce continues to improve without getting in your way.

Regardless of your desktop choice, Fedora 18 offers…

• Improved storage management SSM (System Storage Manager) is an easy-to-use command-line interface tool that presents a unified view of storage management tools. Devices, storage pools, volumes, and snapshots can now be managed with one tool, with the same syntax for managing all of your storage. (It’s great for systems administrators, too!)

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of moo-tivating goodies:

• Fresh versions of programming languages ​​Using Perl, Rails, or Python? All three of these languages ​​are updated in Fedora 18. We’ve got Rails 3.2, Python 3.3, and Perl 5.16 fresh off the farm.
• Clojure Clojure gets more love with the addition of tooling packages, including the Leinengen build tool, as well as Clojure libraries and frameworks, including Korma and Noir.
• DragonEgg connects GCC and LLVM DragonEgg is a plugin for the GCC compilers to allow use of the LLVM optimization and code-generation framework. DragonEgg provides software developers with more optimization and code-generation options for use with the GCC compilers. DragonEgg also allows GCC to be used for cross-compilation to target architectures supported by LLVM without requiring any special cross-compilation compiler packages. Fedora continues to develop and use GCC as the standard default compiler.

For systems administrators

Keep track of your infrastructure herds with these new features:

• Offline system updates Systems can now be updated offline, allowing for a more stable update of critical system components. This functionality is only integrated with GNOME Desktop Environment in this release but uses the distribution neutral PackageKit and systemd API’s and hence can be made available for other desktop environments as well based on the interest from upstream developers.
• Storage enhancements StorageManagement is a collection of tools and libraries for managing storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).
• Samba 4 This popular suite of tools has long provided file- and print-sharing services in heterogeneous operating system environments. The long-awaited Samba 4 introduces the first free and open source implementation of Active Directory protocols and includes a new scripting interface, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba’s internals.
• Riak A fault-tolerant key-value store, Riak provides easy operations and predictable scaling as a NoSQL database.

For clouds and virtualization

Do you spend your days grazing gazing into the clouds? Here’s just a taste of some of the cloud and virt features you’ll see in Fedora 18:

• Eucalyptus Eucalyptus makes its first appearance in Fedora, with their 3.2 release included in F18. This platform for on-premise (private) Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network, and storage.
• OpenStack With the Folsom release in Fedora 18, OpenStack continues to have the newest releases in Fedora. This open source cloud computing platform enables users to deploy their own cloud infrastructures for private or public cloud deployments. Heat, an incubated OpenStack project, is also available in F18, providing an API that enables the orchestration of cloud applications using file or web based templates.
• oVirt Engine The management application for the oVirt virtualization platform, oVirt Engine, is updated to the newest version, 3.1. This release includes extensive new features, including support for live snapshots, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, quotas, and more.
• Suspend and resume support for virt guests Virtual machines get love with this feature, enabling the ability to suspend and resume guests, with the close of a laptop lid or menu option or via the command line.

And that’s only the beginning. For a more complete list with details of all the new features in Fedora 18, steer over here.