Fedora Ships Version 14 'Laughlin'Fedora Ships Version 14 'Laughlin'

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Staying on schedule, the Fedora Project on Monday made available Fedora 14, the latest iteration of its free, open source operating system distribution.

The Red Hat-sponsored, community-supported venture -- codenamed Laughlin -- entered beta on Sept. 28, and the group releases a new distribution approximately every six months.

"I'm very proud of the work that has been put into Fedora 14," said Jared Smith, Fedora project leader. "A myriad of contributors have helped to make free and open source software more pervasive with this release."

Fedora 14 includes GNOME 2.32, which includes some architectural changes developed in anticipation for the upcoming GNOME 3. The latest version of Fedora also features KDE 4.5, which provides a new notification system and preliminary support for tiling in the KWin window manager. In addition, the operating system features framework software for Spice, an infrastructure for desktop virtualization, and new debugging features, such as support for dynamic, unplanned memory usage tracking and faster launch because of pre-generated indexes.

Other new capabilities include Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support for remote and out-of-band management; enhanced netbook and small device software from the MeeGo community; and a framework for maintaining system security based on OpenSCAP, an open source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol, backed by NIST standards.

The open source software includes Netbeans 6.9, an integrated development environment; Eclipse, an IDE with tooling for various languages; and an extended Gdb debugger that incorporates new commands that make it easier to track down and fix excessive memory usage within programs and libraries.

On the programming side, Fedora 14's package repositories provide an LLVM-based compiler for the D programming language as well as an associated runtime library. In addition, the operating system includes Perl 6 compiler Rakudo Star, Erlang R14, and Python 2.7.

Coinciding with the debut of its latest operating system, the organization premiered its newly designed website. Designers used only free and open source software, available in the Fedora repository, to design and create the site.

To date, more than 22,000 registered contributors have participated in the Fedora Project. Currently, there are about 700 Fedora Ambassadors, who volunteer to represent the Fedora Project at community and trade events, speaking to public and private groups about the organization and free and open source software, according to the Fedora Project.