Fedora 8, Live Today

Today, Fedora 8 is available for download. The newest release brings with it a developer spin, a games spin and an electronic-lab spin, in addition to the GNOME and KDE desktop spins that were first part of Fedora 7.

Fedora’s development priorities tend to come in cycles. If you think back to the Fedora Core 6 release cycle, you will remember that a significant portion of the engineering goals for that release were driven by the knowledge that Fedora Core 6 would be the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Everyone knew going in that Fedora Core 6 would be more “corporate” than “community.” And that was OK, because we also knew that once Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released, the Fedora Project would be able to spend its next several releases focused on its community-related priorities.

Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 need to be thought of together in that context. The overarching goal for both of those releases has been in the realm of custom spins. We debuted this model in Fedora 7 with pungi, livecd-creator and revisor. Fedora 8 has expanded this further, and has proven that the hypothesis of “if we give people the tools, they will come.”

Additionally, we have seen organizations like Creative Commons use the Fedora build tools in the past year as the basis for their own custom Linux projects, built using Fedora as its foundation.

There are a tremendous number of new features in Fedora 8 like a new look and feel, PulseAudio volume control, security improvements and lots more. There are too many enhancements for us to list here, but there is an excellent release summary on the Fedora Project wiki that we encourage you to read if you want more specifics about the ins and outs of Fedora 8.

We also have a series of interviews with some of the developers who worked on these features, which offer interesting insights.

See more news on Fedora 8 from Red Hat at the start of next week.