Fedora's Beefy Miracle Sizzling with Alpha 1

Dennis Gilmore, Release Engineer at Red Hat for Fedora, today announced the kick-off of the run-up to Fedora 17 with Alpha 1. He said, "Hot dog! The Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" Alpha Release is available! This release offers a preview of some of the best and meatiest free and open source technology currently under development. Relish in a glimpse of the future:"

The announcement, peppered with hot dog references, outlines some of the new features in store for Fedora 17 users. Again, only a direct quote will do here:

When we said Beefy, we weren't kidding: an a-bun-dance of condiments, err, features, are available to help you feed your hunger for the best in free and open source software. We take pride in our toppings, and in our fine ingredients; Fedora 17 includes both over- and under-the-bun improvements that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free (range) software.

Some of these include:

* GIMP has been updated to the long awaited 2.8 release
* GCC 4.7.x
* GNOME 3.4
* KDE 4.8
* Linux 3.2
* Moved all to /usr
* Thin Provisioning
* SysV to Systemd
* Services in private /tmp
* Rework LiveCD
* New Installer
* Password quality checking
* Ext4 support beyond 16T

Gilmore is requesting that as many folks as possible help test this release and report bugs. Or as he put it, "Together, we can make Fedora a franktastic, rock-solid distribution." More information helping, lots more detail on what's new and upcoming, as well as more beefy puns can be found in the full announcement. The only beta is due on April 3. The release candidate is expected around April 24 and the final is scheduled for May 8.