Red Hat Releases Fedora 14 BetaRed Hat Releases Fedora 14 Beta

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora Project on Tuesday released Laughlin, the sole beta of the Fedora 14 distribution, with the final release slated to debut this fall.

"The beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 14. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 14, scheduled to be released in early November," said Dennis Gilmore, a release engineer at Red Hat. "We invite you to join us and participate in making Fedora 14 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback."

The Linux operating system incorporates Spice -- Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments -- desktop virtualization infrastructure. This capability is expected to be extended in future releases, according to the Fedora team.

In addition, Fedora 14 will incorporate "alternative environments like Sugar, and software from the MeeGo project," the Fedora team said. The new version will deliver "the MeeGo Netbook UX 1.0 experience," the release notes said.

Other new features include extended utilities for remote or powered-off management of servers with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) capabilities; improved debugging and integration with existing tools to enhance Fedora as a RAD platform; and updates in an array of programming languages such as D programming language support and Rakudo Star, an early implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine.

The next-generation systems management for faster start-up and on-demand loading and uploading of services is expected to be offered as a technology preview in Fedora 14. This is expected to become the default initialization system in Fedora 15, the development team said.

The Fedora Project is a worldwide community of more than 20,000 collaborators who have signed the contributor license agreement, according to the group.