Fedora 26 Beta now available

We’re pleased to announce that Fedora 26, the latest version of the Fedora operating system, is now available in beta. The Fedora Project is a global community that works together to lead the advancement of free and open source software, culminating in the leading-edge Fedora operating system which helps to answer end user needs across the computing spectrum. As part of the community’s mission, the project delivers three editions, each one a free, Linux-based system tailored to meet specific use cases: Fedora 26 Atomic Host Beta, Fedora 26 Server Beta, and Fedora 26 Workstation Beta.

Each edition is built from a common set of base packages, which form the core foundation of the Fedora operating system. As with all new versions of Fedora, Fedora 26 Beta provides many minor bug fixes and tweaks to these underlying components, as well as new and enhanced packages, including:

• Updated compilers and languages, including GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 7, Go 1.8, Python 3.6 and Ruby 2.4

• DNF 2.0, the latest version of Fedora’s next-generation package management system with improved backwards compatibility with Yum

• A new storage configuration screen for the Anaconda installation program, enabling “bottom-up” configuration from devices and partitions

• Updates to Fedora Media Writer that enable users to create bootable SD cards with Fedora for ARM-based devices, like Raspberry Pi

Fedora 26 Atomic Host Beta
Providing a minimal footprint operating platform, Fedora 26 Atomic Host offers a tailored experience for running container-based workloads in the cloud or on bare metal. Delivered on a two-week refresh schedule, Fedora 26 Atomic Host Beta provides a base image for creating virtual machines, an Atomic Host image for creating hosts for container deployment and a docker image.

The latest version of Fedora Atomic Host includes:

• Containerized Kubernetes as an alternative to built-in Kubernetes binaries, enabling users to more easily run different versions of the container orchestration engine.

• The latest version of rpm-ostree which includes support for direct rpm install, a reload command and a clean-up command.

• System Containers, a way of installing system infrastructure software, like networking or Kubernetes, on Fedora Atomic Host in a container.

• Updated versions of docker, atomic and Cockpit for enhanced container building, system support and workload monitoring.

Fedora 26 Workstation Beta
The desktop experience for developers and general users is not neglected in Fedora 26 Beta, with Fedora 26 Workstation Beta featuring the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment and offering many of the latest developer and desktop tools to improve ease-of-use, drive modern application development and enhance the overall user experience. A key update is a series of improvements to Builder, which now provides expanded support for a variety of application build systems, including Flatpak, CMake, Meson and Rust, as well as integration with Valgrind for project profiling.

Additional updates and new features in Fedora 26 Workstation Beta include:

• Night Light, which uses the Natural Light feature in GNOME to change the color temperature of user displays based on time of day.

• LibreOffice 5.3, the latest update to the popular open source office productivity suite that provides several new capabilities across LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Calc and LibreOffice Impress.

Fedora 26 Server Beta
Fedora 26 Server Beta provides a flexible, multi-role platform for data center operations. New features include:

• FreeIPA 4.5, which features improvements for running in containers

• SSSD file caching which speeds up the resolution of user and group queries

Additionally, the Fedora Project plans to provide more details in the coming weeks around “Boltron,” a preview of Fedora’s Modularity technology delivered as part of Fedora Server. More information can be found at at https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/.

You can take Fedora 26 Beta for a spin yourself at https://getfedora.org.

As always, the Fedora Project team wants to hear from you – let us know about any bugs or problems that you encounter, as your feedback can help us improve Fedora 26. Common issues can be found on the Fedora 26 common bugs page (please read this on how to effectively report bugs).

If you are interested in becoming more involved with Fedora, we want you on our team! You can contribute to the Fedora Project in many ways other than bug reporting – the Fedora Project is always looking for translators, testers, content creators, marketers, designers and so much more. Whatever your skill set, we would love to have you involved – find out more at http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/.

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored community project. For more information about Fedora, please visit the Fedora Project homepage.