Fedora 15 “Lovelock” Beta Released

Today the first beta of Fedora 15, codenamed “Lovelock” has been released. This is a very important release for the Fedora 15 development cycle because it represents the final feature list that will make it to Fedora 15, which is expected to be released in late May. From now on only bug fix updates will be released until the final release.

Fedora 15 Beta is a very significant release for the Fedora 15 development cycle in more than one way. One of the most significant changes in this release is GNOME 3. GNOME 3 was recently released and includes a completely new user interface called the GNOME Shell. With GNOME 3, Fedora 15 Beta now has a completely different user experience from earlier releases. If GNOME is not your Desktop Environment of choice, the Fedora spins with Xfce and LXDE have also been updated.

As we have mentioned earlier, Fedora 15 Beta still has LibreOffice as the default office suite instead of OpenOffice. Another new application that has been included in this release is BoxGrinder. Like LibreOffice, BoxGrinder was first included in Fedora 15 Alpha. BoxGrinder allows users to easily create appliances (virtual images) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2) from simple plaintext application files. Fedora 15 Beta also includes a dynamic firewall. The dynamic firewall makes it possible to change firewall settings without restarting the firewall. This feature is particularly useful for persistent connections.

For the coders out there, the development tools that comes in Fedora 15 Beta have also been updated. It comes with GCC 4.6, Maven 3, OCaml 3.12, Python 3.2 and Rails 3.0.3. In fact Fedora 15 Beta has been built using GCC 4.6.

The users from India will also be glad to know that the new Indian Rupee symbol has now been included in Fedora 15 Beta by default.

If you want to test Fedora 15, you can download the ISO from here. However, remember that this is not a final release and bugs are expected. If you find any bugs, you can report it to make Fedora 15 better.

You can see the feature list here.

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