Fedora 10 Alpha: Give Us Your Feedback

Following the release of Fedora 9 last May, we’ve been hard at work in anticipation for Fedora 10. OK, so maybe we took one day off to celebrate the success of Fedora 9, but we didn’t wait too long before diving in to implement cool, new features in the next release. Fedora 10 (Cambridge) is due out in November 2008, and the Alpha release provides a chance for the whole community to weigh in. Tell us what you think and get involved in testing the new features – check out the Fedora 10 Alpha release notes, and then download the Alpha.

Red Hat engineers working in Fedora and upstream communities have been developing several new features slated for Fedora 10. Here are just a few of the features that we’re very excited to deliver:

• Glitch free audio. The revolutionary PulseAudio stack has been enhanced to use timer-based scheduling. This means that it uses less power, is more hardware independent, and adjusts dynamically to keep audio data flowing without interruption - minimizing drop outs.

   

• Sectool. Fedora 10 will feature a brand new security auditing and intrusion detection system. It has both text and graphical front ends, features highly configurable groups for adjusting test runs, and is completely modular and extensible. Administrators and the community at large can write their own tests to extend its functionality even further.

   

• Connection Sharing. Fedora 10 delivers on the promise of NetworkManager’s “Create new wireless network” tool, with easy setup of an ad-hoc wifi network on any machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card. If the machine has primary network connection (wired, 3G, second wireless card), routing is set up so that devices connected to the ad-hoc wifi network can share the connection to the outside network.

There are more great features on the way. As always, everything that goes into and comes out of the Fedora Project is completely open and free for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute. Keep an eye on our wiki’s feature list to see how things are progressing throughout the Fedora 10 development cycle.