RALEIGH, USA: The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project has announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution.

"Fedora volunteer contributors and Red Hat engineers worked together to develop the cutting-edge features found in Fedora 10. Their widespread appeal, combined with Fedora's policy of collaborating with upstream free software communities, means that many of these features will be found in other Linux distributions in the future," said Paul Frields, fedora project leader at Red Hat.

Approximately every six months, contributors from Fedora's membership of over 17,000 people collaborate to produce a complete, general-purpose, no-cost software platform. Since its inception, Fedora has adopted a leadership role in the development of open source software and continuously demonstrates its potential across the enterprise.

This community of users and developers have blazed the trail in key feature development and actively forms the roadmap for open source technologies found in many platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora 10, the tenth release in five years, features substantial virtualization improvements for remote installation and management of storage provisioning. These features will make system administration of virtual machine hosts and guests easier and more capable of automation, especially as they are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, Fedora 10 includes NetworkManager connection sharing, allowing laptop users with an Ethernet or mobile broadband connection to provide Internet routing to others through the laptop wireless interface, for instant collaboration anywhere, anytime.

"With the release of Fedora 10, the Fedora Project continues its tradition of innovation and community. Fedora sets the standards for technical features that are relevant to everyone from desktop users to the business enterprise, and advance free software worldwide," said Frields.

Plymouth

This release includes the premiere of a new graphical boot system called Plymouth, designed to speed up the boot process by taking advantage of a new kernel mode setting feature.

Plymouth was designed by Fedora contributors and targeted primarily at ATI cards, but will be expanded in the future to support a broader range of media cards. Fedora 10 also features increased hardware support for a vast array of webcams, and better handling of printers via both direct physical connections and networks. Further, PackageKit, a software management tool that originally debuted in Fedora 9, has been extended in this release to provide on-demand codec software installation.

Fedora 10 also enhances its commitment to security with a new security auditing and detection toolkit called SecTool, and a brand-new set of Python bindings that allow programmers to use the FIPS-140 validated NSS library for rapid development of secure applications.

Fedora 10 includes the all-new OpenOffice.org 3.0 and GNOME 2.24.1, for maximum desktop productivity and ease of use; a rewritten audio system for faster response and lower power usage; a full set of appliance building tools; and support for more hardware than any other operating system.

Click here for more information on Fedora 10 and to download.