From the ‘Beefy Miracle’s Desert’ files:
The clock is starting to tick down on the Fedora Linux release with the feature freeze now in place. As such, now is as good a time as any to take a look at some of the new features that are likely to land when Fedora 18 goes live at the end of the year.
No, I’m not going to talk about Secure Boot (but it’s in there).
Initial User Experience
I wrote about the Initial User Experiencea couple months back, and it’s still part of the Fedora 18 features list. With Initial User Experience, the plan is to provide new users with smoother first impression and a guided tour of features.
FedFS
This is a neat one. According to Fedora’s feature wiki page:
“RFC 5716 introduces the Federated File System (FedFS, for short). FedFS is an extensible standardized mechanism by which system administrators construct a coherent namespace across multiple file servers using file system referrals.”
I’d like to think of this feature as symbolic links on steroids.
OwnCloud
Sure SUSE has had OwnCloud in its repos for over a year now but… hey it’s great to see this (open source Dropbox kinda/sort clone) application land in Fedora now too.
MATE
Who likes GNOME Shell? (not me and apparently I’m not alone). MATE, the fork of GNOME 2, with that traditional navigation (places people!) is back!!
Virt Live Snapshots
“Live snapshots allow a user to take a snapshot of a virtual machine while the guest is running, thus preserving the state and data of a VM at a specific point in time,” Fedora’s feature wiki page states.
This is a big deal. Live snapshots (once this is fully matured) will provide the ability for real time resiliency and more effective always-on system delivery.
Yes, there are more features that will be in Fedora 18, I’m also interested in seeing how the Samba 4 implementation lines up as well as the usual lineup of SELinux/security type optimizations. Fedora 18 will also be important for its inclusion of the OpenStack Folsom release, which will eventually be the base for Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack in 2013.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
