Today, the community-driven and Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project shows the latest in a line of innovative and compelling distribution releases with Fedora 11, code-named “Leonidas.” This release, like its predecessors, is the culmination of over six months of work by the Fedora community. It combines the efforts of volunteers, Red Hat engineers, and many upstream communities into a leading-edge distribution that anyone can download, use and redistribute for free.

Twice a year, the Fedora Project releases a new version of Fedora with a projected lifetime of about a year. This quick release cycle results in consistent development and integration of the latest in open source technologies. That makes Fedora useful not just to hobbyists and enthusiasts, but also to those looking for a sneak peek at technologies that may be found later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And Fedora 11 contains the broadest set of features yet for a Fedora release, including:

• New fingerprint reader support that makes biometric support easy and well-integrated

• Automatic font and mimetype installation that downloads support as needed for foreign-language documents and other content types

• New IBus input method system that makes it easy to switch languages without having to restart a session

• Improved kernel modesetting features for more video cards, including many models of Intel, ATI and NVidia

• Support for the latest filesystems like ext4, with much higher device and file size limits, and faster consistency checking

• Improved virtualization features such as a more flexible and interactive console, and a rewritten VM creation wizard

• MinGW cross-compiler tool set for creating Windows executables using the Fedora distribution

Check out the release video; that features Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields and Red Hat Community Architecture manager Max Spevack, talking about how open source evolves in Fedora. To read more about this release of Fedora visit the F11 tour on the Fedora wiki.