Fedora 20 Now Available to the Public

The Fedora Project announced the general availability of Fedora 20 this morning, saying "Heisenbug' adds ARM as primary architecture and enhances integration with virtualization and cloud computing technologies." But that's not all that new in Fedora 20. In fact, there's something for everybody in today's release.

The first new feature highlighted in announcements is support for the ARM architecture which is already quite popular and support by many other distributions, but also "shows great promise as a powerful and cost-effective technology for the server world." A lot of effort was put into improving "Cloud" (and virtualization) support as well. Their cloud "images are now built using the same tooling as other release media" and are "well-suited to running as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack."

For system administrators, package documentation is now stored in an unversioned directory, SSSD adds access to Windows CIFS with two new tools, and SSD block device caching support. Some other highlights include:

• * Libvirt Virtualization Client Access Control
• * Sendmail not installed by default
• * Syslog not installed, replaced by journald (with new "cursor" marking system)
• * systemd has two new types: scope and slice

Desktop users have several choices in Fedora. The default in Fedora 20 Desktop Edition is GNOME 3.10, but "spins" are available in KDE 4.11, LXDE, Xfce, MATE-Compiz, and Sugar. GNOME Software is a new application for browsing and installing software in Fedora 20 Desktop. GNOME 3.10 in Fedora 20 includes several new apps. Music is the default music player in GNOME 3.10; Maps is a map viewer that uses OpenStreetMap data; and Photos and Notes were improved in performance, features, and stability. The KDE spin features the new KScreen multi-display configuration tool, Taskbar was ported to QtQuick, and Notification pop-ups have a configuration button. Performance improvements were highlighted especially in KDE 4.11 and KDE in Fedora 20 features a new networking applet that supports just about any kind of connection you can think of. Sugar got Facebook and Twitter integration and improved application features.

Other improvements include:

• * Experimental 3D printing support
• * New ACPICA Tools
• * Developer Assistant GUI
• * General NetworkManager Improvements
• * Linux 3.11.10
• * GCC 4.8.2
• * LibreOffice 4.1.3
• * Firefox 25.0
• * Xorg X Server 1.14.4

This is just some of the new goodies awaiting users, sysadmins, and developers in Fedora 20. The official announcement is published at www.redhat.com, but the Release Notes have more detail. Download Fedora 20 from fedoraproject.org.