BANGALORE, INDIA: The long awaited Fedora 11 is finally here and you can install it from this month's PCQ DVD . You will not find anything dramatically different with the new distro's user interface, look and feel. But a lot of significant changes have been made under the hood.
Faster boot up : The boot up time has been considerably trimmed in Fedora 11 with Fedora developers claimming that it will boot a recent age machine in less than 20 seconds. Another interesting thing which you will notice here is the boot information icon at the GDM (Genome Desktop Manger) login screen.
The reason why it is here is very simple. The bootup process is completely graphical and doesn't show any message while booting the machine even if there is any boot up service error. While booting to GDM, if you see this icon, it means there was a service error while booting. Clicking on this icon will show you the complete output of bootup text screen. You can find this icon at the bottom right corner of the GDM login screen.
EXT4 File System: The biggest enhancement in Fedora is the inclusion of ext49fourth extended) as the default file system. Some key features of the file system are support for 1 Exabyte disks and 16TB size for a single file. It also has exceeded the limit of having 32000 subdirectories. These may not matter fro an ordinary user, so for him the benefits are that it's more stable, provides faster file access and disk scans, and is backward compatible with preview file system.
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With OpenChange plugin, now you can share calendars through Exchange and sync it to Evolution.
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OpenChange: This is a new out of the box port for accessing Microsoft Exchange and most of its features from a Linux based mail client. The OpenChange provides a client side library that can be used in existing messaging clients and offers native compatibility with Exchange Server.
By native comparability here, we mean support for sending and receiving mails, connecting to proxy calenders/calender sharing, accessing the public folders, integration with LDAP/ADS, accessing shared address book, etc. OpenChange allows clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, and other open source applications to utilize the full range of MAPI functionality including messaging, but right now only Evolution and kdepim has the out of the box support for OpenChange.
We also tried connecting evolution to a Exchange server and we were able to sync shared calenders and address book apart of just sending and receiving mails.
FingerPrint: If you have a laptop with fingerprint reorganization then you don't need to hunt for its drivers. Now Linux can support most of the fingerprint drivers and can be used for login and other purposes. We tested it out on an HCL laptop and it worked perfectly.
