What New in Fedora 8

Fedora 8 Test 3 Release Announcement The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community supported open source project. Its goal is the rapid progress of free and open source software and content.

The Fedora Project makes use of public forums, open processes, rapid innovation, meritocracy, and transparency in pursuit of the best operating system and platform that free and open source software can provide. This is the last test release before the development freeze and a great time to test all those packages that you know and love. Test 3 is for beta users. This is the time when we must have full community participation. Without this participation both hardware and software functionality suffers.

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join.

Whats New :

• Online Desktop provides a desktop experience designed around online services. A preview of Online Desktop is provided via BigBoard, which is a optional sidebar in GNOME.

• KDE 3.5.7 is available in the KDE Live image as well as the regular DVD. The KDE 4 (Beta) Development Environment is available in the repository.

• Live installations are faster and require a smaller root filesystem. The file system layout has also changed somewhat. System files for the Live images are now under LiveOS/, and a new README file has been provided as a short introduction to the live image.

• Package management now features much better performance via yum and friends.

• The completely free and open source Java environment called IcedTea is installed by default. IcedTea is derived from OpenJDK, includes a browser plugin based on GCJ, and is available for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. GCJ is still the default on PPC architecture.

• CodecBuddy is now included, and promotes free, superior quality, open formats to end users trying to play multimedia content under patent encumbered or proprietary formats.

• Bluetooth devices and tools now have better graphical and system integration.
• Laptop users benefit from the "quirks" features in HAL, including better suspend/resume and multimedia keyboard support.

• There is now improved power management thanks to both a tickless kernel in x86 and x86_64 architectures, and a reduction in unnecessary processor wakeups via powertop.

• Eclipse 3.3 (Europa), a new release of the great IDE and development platform, is available as part of this release.

• The pam_console module has been removed in favor of access control via HAL, which modernizes the desktop.

• NetworkManager 0.7 provides improved wireless network management support. It includes support for multiple devices and provides the capability of system-wide configuration, among many other enhancements. This transition may induce some regressions temporarily, and more testing and feedback is appreciated.

• Secure remote management capability is now provided for Xen, KVM, and QEMU virtualization.
• Transifex provides a web-based translation interface to allow users to contribute translation work for Fedora hosted projects as well as being able to provide translations to upstream directly to any upstream project.
• Integration of unique build IDs into Fedora's software building infrastructure now provide enhanced debugging capabilities and core dumps.

• Fedora now offers easier rebranding of Fedora derivatives via a generic-logos software package. Changes in Fedora's mirror structure also make creation of derivatives easier.

• Fedora now includes support for Nepali Language, extending its reach to many more users.

You can get Fedora 8 Test 3 in here.