| Fedora 14 final released with Amazon EC2 support |
Nov. 02, 2010
 The Fedora Project announced the Fedora 14 final release, adding Amazon EC2 support. Fedora also features faster boot-times and JPEG downloads, the MeeGo for Netbooks UI stack, improved debugging, and a new "Spice" virtualization desktop framework, says the project.
Released in beta form at the end of September, Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") is now available in final form. This community-driven open source distro is a techie-focused upstream contributor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The community has also upgraded its Fedoraproject.org site with the Fedora 14 release.
Most of the key new Fedora 14 features were explored in our previous coverage. New to the final release, however, is Fedora support for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). "For the first time since Fedora 8, Fedora will release on the EC2 cloud," says the Fedora Project. Official images allow EC2 users to "confidently try out the leading edge technologies of Fedora in the cloud," adds the project.
The final Fedora 14 release updates a number of packages, including the Linux kernel (Linux 2.6.35), Perl 5.12, and Python 2.7. In addition Boost has been upgraded to version 1.44, Netbeans moves to version 6.9, the KDE desktop moves up to the 4.5 release, Sugar steps up to version 0.90, and Eclipse has advanced to the Helios Release.
Systemd in action on Fedora 14
(Click to enlarge)
Fedora 14's touted performance improvements include a Libjpeg-turbo feature that is claimed to nearly halve the time to load and save JPEG images. Also included is a technology preview of Systemd (pictured above). The Systemd software is claimed to speed boot-time as well as to provide on-demand loading and unloading of services.
Fedora 14 also provides a new Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) framework for providing a virtual desktop infrastructure. Spice offers "high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines," says the Fedora Project.
Spice accelerates 2D graphics, audio playing and recording, encryption, and other tasks while working in a virtualized environment, says the project. The initial implementation, however, is described as a "rudimentary foundation."
Never one to shy away from bleeding edge technology, Fedora 14 is one of the first Linux distributions to include the MeeGo stack for netbooks. The distribution offers a modified version of MeeGo 1.0, rather than the latest release. Because it omits certain MeeGo features it is not considered to be fully MeeGo compatible, says the project.
Another key enhancement is support for the "D" systems programming language. There are also new memory debugging tools, including a new "gdb-heap" package, which is said to reveal how a process is using dynamic memory.
Of special interest to embedded developers is Fedora 14's support for an emerging Milkymist open source embedded system. Still under development, Milkymist supports live synthesis of interactive visual effects for VJs, says the Milkymist project.
For more details on Fedora 14, see our previous coverage, here and check out the release note and download links farther below.
Availability
The final version of Fedora 14 is available now for free download. The announcement may be found here, and the release notes may be found here.
-- Eric Brown
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