Fedora 11 – Wow!!!

I’d like to think I’m pretty tech savvy for a CEO and have always been an early adopter of the latest and greatest tech innovations. It comes as no shock to those who know me well that I spent yesterday evening taking Fedora 11 for a test drive. I’m not ashamed to admit that I count down the days until the latest release of Fedora comes out with the same level of anticipation that my kids have when they know their birthday is coming up soon. As the title of this blog notes, one word sums up my Fedora 11 experience – wow!!!

There is so much to be excited about from improved virtualization to ext4. The latest enhancements were apparent before I even ran Fedora 11. The downloading experience was the fastest I’ve seen on the first day for previous releases. And, Fedora 11 is so easy to install that even my non-techy CEO counterparts could run Fedora 11 with ease.

On the theme of speed, I installed Fedora 11 on a pretty old machine at home and the boot is amazing. It’s almost too fast - I didn’t get a chance to fully enjoy the new graphics during boot! I’ve also installed Fedora 11 on a HP2133 netbook. It works great and handles fonts on a small screen beautifully.

Several of the advances in Fedora 11 are “under the hood” and I look forward to (and my wife is dreading) this weekend, when I can spend more time trying out Fedora 11.

Fedora continues to do a great job of fulfilling its role as a community R&D lab, and Red Hat as a major contributor benefits immensely from each new release of Fedora. Community participation is a bedrock principle of how Red Hat works, and directly equates to our increased ability to focus on the work that is vital for our customers.

Thank you to the entire Fedora community for a fantastic new release!