The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 19. Fedora is a community Linux project sponsored by Red Hat that serves as a test bed for tools and technologies that will one day make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The latest release, which is code-named "Schrödinger's Cat," includes updates to standard components, such as Gnome 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.10, the MATE desktop 1.6, and Linux kernel 3.9.0.
Other improvements include Extlinux, a lightweight alternative to the Grub boot loader, which is intended to accelerate the boot process, especially in virtualized installations. The Anaconda installer has been enhanced to provide better storage options and now supports Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, and multipath. In addition, Fedora can now become part of an Active Directory domain during installation.
Enhancements to the virtualization toolset include Open-VM-Tools, a free implementation of VMware Tools. KVM and libvirt enable efficient migration of virtualized storage, even if it was not shared between VM hosts. Fedora 19 also comes with the recent "Grizzly" version of the OpenStack cloud-computing framework.
Fedora joins the ranks of other Linux distros that have changed the default SQL implementation from MySQL to MariaDB. (MySQL is still available in the package repository.) Puppet Version 3 provides configuration management, and Fedora's OpenLMI management infrastructure has expanded to include new monitoring and configuration options.