Last week brought an early holiday present to many open source enthusiasts and technology consumers with the release of Fedora 12. Every six months the anticipation builds as I look forward to taking the latest version of Fedora for a test drive and trying out all of the new features and enhancements. After just a few days with Fedora 12 I’m already impressed with the feature set and polish in this release.

I’ve installed Fedora 12 on one of my laptops and also on a Dell mini netbook. First off, I really like the artwork in Fedora 12 and the new theme with the rays of light looks great. The Fedora Design Team continues to impress me with the new graphics and imagery they create for each release. Beyond that, everything just feels better and more comfortable, and the extra attention to detail all around the desktop really pays off.

I installed Fedora 12 from a USB key and the process was flawless and the fastest I’ve experienced yet with Fedora. The boot time was also very quick – even on my netbook. I’m excited to see Fedora’s support for the Moblin Core desktop environment in Fedora 12. This is my first experience with Moblin and I’m looking forward to putting in more time to test it out. Fedora continues to show the flexibility and functionality of free software and its impressive coverage of mini systems and netbooks with the inclusion of Moblin in Fedora 12.

Another feature in Fedora 12 that I’m happy to see is the improved webcam support. My webcam just works with Fedora 12.

Fedora 12 also includes several new virtualization features such as libguestfs that I look forward to trying out.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects including Fedora. This model enables Red Hat to deliver superior technology, faster, and with resulting products that are better suited to customer requirements. I thank the Fedora community for its continued hard work and congratulate them on yet another solid release. I encourage everyone to download Fedora 12 today and take it for a spin: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.