History (and Releases) Are Cyclical: This is Fedora 11!

I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world.

But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

So what new features can we expect to see in Fedora 11?

The Fedora Project is rolling out some impressive new features and functions with Leonidas. One of the most notable is the use of ext4 as the default file system (while many distributions are planning on making ext4 the default in the near future, some recent releases have chosen to keep it optional this time around). The Fedora team says that aside from ext4 performance enhancements, Leonidas users will be treated to faster boot and shutdown procedures, an automatic font, codec and clipart installer, and the DeviceKit device management tool designed to work with (and sometimes stand in for) hal. Fedora 11 users can also look forward to updated versions of the KDE, GNOME, and Xfce desktop environments, improvements in direct rendering, and better volume control and power management tools.

While the Leonidas Preview is well on its way to a final, stable form, it is still a testing release -- meaning, of course, that it shouldn't be used on production machines, and that those willing to give it a whirl are strongly encouraged to explore and push the new features hard to find any remaining bugs, and file (or help resolve) bug reports.