[Fedora-Ambassadors] Fedora 8 Announcement

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Fedora 8 Announcement

On this autumn period where the best fruits are ripe, it comes the
time to harvest the new Fedora release.

This new Fedora is named “Werewolf”, but fear not, as this release
will bring you all the safety and stability that you could dream of.
The main point of this new version is without any doubt SIMPLICITY.

After 5 months of intense work, and in order to provide you the latest
technologies, this new release will be for you as for us a major evolution.

The major new features are (among others):

Codeina :
Fedora by default does not provide non-Free codecs. This is sometime a
problem for the end users who had to install them on their own. Codeina
is created for this purpose, which is to help you to install the required
codecs to helps you to listen to your MP3 or watch your movies,
in a simple, legal way.

PulseAudio :
Fedora 8 includes the latest generation of sound server, PulseAudio.
PulseAudio offers you more control over your sound system, like
per-application volume control, output redirection and networked sound
server. This new technology also opened a gate to new functionalities
like automatic volume adjustments and other great and fun features.
PulseAudio: Compiz for your ears.

System-config-firewall & System-config-selinux :
Fedora 8 improved system-config-securitylevel by separating firewall and
selinux configuration utility and adding more functionalities into it. This
new interface is much more accessible for the new Fedora users. It is a very
intuitive interface thanks to its step by step configuration.

System-config-printer :
The printer configuration system has also been improved. The new
system-config-printer package will now create automatically the
printing queue, this was the step where so much users has failed on the past.

NetworkManager 0.7 :
NetworkManager have been entirely rewritten in order to satisfy
to the wired and wireless network, giving a higher speed of connection
and a better integration (thanks among other to the Dbus API and the WPA
for the wireless).

Better laptop support :
Thanks to the information returned by “smolt” the Fedora team has
improved the management of the Suspend to Ram and Suspend to Disk
system, and the recognition of the multimedia keys on the keyboard.

Package management :
Pirut (a GUI for yum, the package manager) has been updated in order to
meet the users' demand. It is now able to manage directly the
repositories from this GUI, simplifying a lot the work of new users.

Fedora 8's theme :
For each new Fedora release, a new theme is created. For Fedora 8, the
icons, the windows' border have also been changed to fit the theme. This
project is named “Nodoka”.
The desktop background is named “Infinity”. You could say, “yes, well it
is just a new desktop background”, but you are wrong. The "Infinity" background
uses a new XML based background animation feature. The background changes over
the day, from blue during sunrise, to a softer blue in the afternoon,
relaxing purple during sunset, and to a dark blue at night.

Virtualization :
Virtualization is an important technology of which more and more people
started using it. In this new release, Virtualization in Fedora has also
been improved. Libvirt is now capable of remote administration and it is
now more secure as a new library allow you to use SSL/TLS protocol to secure
your access. Another improvement is on the the graphical interface of virt-manager,
which is more user friendly while providing the latest functionalities.

IcedTea :
Fedora 8 strives to provide you 100% Free software for your usage. In this new release, Fedora
integrates IcedTea, which is an derivation from Sun's OpenJDK but without the proprietary bits.

FEL (Fedora Electronic Lab) :
This new Fedora spin is created by the "Embedded" Special Interest Group
(SIGs/Embedded) of FedoraProject. This project try to bring as much
VLSI and other Electronic related tools into Fedora. Electronic enthusiast, lecturers,
and Electronic students are encouraged to try this out.

Eclipse 3.3 :
For the developers, we did not forget that the latest version of eclipse
3.3 is available for Fedora. This new version provides a lot of new
functions:
JDT : for Java development.
CDT : Editor, builder and debugger for C and C++.
Autotools : plugin for CDT to support autoconf, and automake (among others).
Mylyn : first interface that allows the developers to request the
Bugzilla's database.
PHPEclipse : plugin for PHP development of test.
Specfile editor : plugin for the SpecFiles for RPM creation.
PyDev : plugin for Python

...

To download this new release, visit page :
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Interested to be a Fedora contributor?. Visit this page:
http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora

The Fedora ambassador, from the FedoraProject.

- Izhar Firdaus -