Fedora 17 Beta Released

With the usual flair we've come to expect surrounding a distribution codenamed "Beefy Miracle," the Beta announcement heralded the great arrival. I almost thought I heard the Superman theme song strike up in the distance. "Want to get a taste of the future?"

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... the beta release of Beefy Miracle! Flying 'round the world at the speed of the intertubes, delivering progress, mustard, and freedom to the masses.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the beta release of Fedora 17. Want to get a taste of the future? Download it now:

Fedora travels down the developmental road so fast, it's hard to keep up. Sometimes it's best to just go back to the source. Some of the planned features for Fedora 17 are:

* ConsoleKit Removal and Automatic Seat Support

* Enterprise Networking with NetworkManager

* Ext4 support beyond 16T

* DRI2 Drivers Only

* D Programming Language

* GIMP 2.8

* GCC 4.7.x

* GNOME 3.4

* Gnome-Shell software rendering

* KDE 4.8

* (KDE) Plasma Dependency Generation and PackageKit Integration

* Multitouch support

* Rework LiveCD

* Services in private /tmp

* Move all to /usr

* SysV to Systemd

Jim Lynch, you might remember him from the Linux Outlaws, took the beta for a spin earlier today and found it interesting with some nice improvements but far from exciting. He is looking forward to testing the final though.

Fedora 17 Beta GNOME 3.4 (courtesy of eyeonlinux.com)

A release candidate has been pushed back to May 8 and the final is schduled for release on May 22.  Download the pre-release at fedoraproject.org.