The Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, has announced that the beta release of Fedora 14 "Laughlin" is now available for download. General availability of the release is expected in early November.
According to the Fedora team, notable new features offered in the latest release include the Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) framework for providing a virtual desktop infrastructure; extended utilities for remote or powered-off management of servers with IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) capabilities; as well as updates in a variety of programming languages, including D programming language support and Raked Star, an early implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine. In addition, the Fedora team says that the next-generation systemd management for faster startup and on-demand loading and unloading of services is expected to be offered as a technology preview in Fedora 14, and is likely to become the default initialization system in Fedora 15.
Fedora 14 release will include a technology called OpenSCAP, which is an open source implementation of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) framework, thereby providing an important capability in enabling properly secured systems, writes Sean Michael Kerner in a recent InternetNews.com article.
Read Kerner's article, "Fedora 14 Linux Boosts Security with OpenSCAP" here.
The Fedora 14 beta is available for download here.