Around about this time 6 months ago, I wrote a post called 5 Reasons You’ll Love Fedora 9. This time around Fedora 10 is about to be released, and there are even more reasons you’ll love this release.

RPM Fusion

Fedora has long received a lot of criticism for not providing support for proprietary software and patented codecs out of the box, for all the reasons we’re so familiar with. In the past, to get access to these forbidden extras there were a number of third party repositories that you could access, some of which were incompatible with the main Fedora repositories as well as with each other.

Now, the teams behind the most common repositories have come together to create one new super repository: RPM Fusion. This is now the only repository you’ll need to get all multimedia codecs, hardware drivers etc.

The really cool thing about RPM Fusion is that thanks to Fedora’s open nature, they’re using exactly the same tools (e.g. build software) and processes to build their packages, so quality is guaranteed.

Better Printing

In Fedora 8 it became possible to plugin almost any printer and any missing drivers would be installed automatically and the printer configured, all without the user having to do anything.

In Fedora 10, the printer control application, system-config-printer, has been completely reworked and simplified. While some of the changes are small, it’s the little things that make all the difference, right? Some of the highlights include:

• not prompting for a root password until it’s needed;
• icons and status symbols for no paper, rejecting jobs etc;
• users are notified if a job has failed, and offered the option of running a diagnostic tool to find out why;
• dialogues have been simplified and de-cluttered

Initial Printer Dialouge

Better Remote Support

Enjoy using your computer to watch movies and listen to music? Want to use your remote to control these applications? Fedora now includes gnome-lirc-properties, which makes configuring and adding new remotes really easy, as well as allowing users to configure custom key press events for their remotes. All of the work done on this feature has been pushed upstream, not just to gnome-lirc-properties, but also to other popular applications to ensure they work correctly with the new configuration tools.

gnome-lirc-properties

Better And Faster Startup

Fedora 10 sees a number of huge improvements to its boot processes. From the very beginning the user will notice that there is no Grub splash anymore, saving time in the boot up process as well as removing some screen flicker to give a more polished finish. For any user who wants to access the boot menu, simply hold down any key during startup and it will appear.

Following on from Grub, users will notice that RHGB is no more. It has been replaced with a brand new application, Plymouth, that takes advantage of kernel based modesetting, allowing for a flicker free boot process, smooth transitions to GDM, and much prettier graphics. It’s not all about aesthetics either, Plymouth doesn’t need a seperate X server to run, and so boot up speed has been improved by this change.

Beyond this, other work has gone on to reduce boot time, including enabling readahead by default, taking advantage of Upstart’s parallel boot system, and much more. All in all, many users should see their system’s start up much quicker.

Connection Sharing

A feature that is sure to be extremely popular at hackfests around the world, connection sharing allows a user to easily setup an ad-hoc wireless network that will then route all traffic through an alternative, primary connection such as a second wi-fi card, a 3G data connection, or a plain old ethernet connection.

This feature relies on work done in Fedora 9 to ensure that all 3G data cards work out of the box, as well as work to allow support of multiple network devices under NetworkManager.

The improvements to NetworkManager don’t just end here either, with many users reporting a significant speed bump when connecting to wireless networks. It now seems to be on a par with Airport in Mac OS X.

Check out this link to see a video of developer Dan Williams explaining how to use the new technology.

First Aid Kit

“Firstaidkit is an automated recovery tool that brings together common recovery processes and applies them to a system. The way that Firstaidkit handles the recovery processes is by means of plugins. The idea being that a plugin will focus on a particular issue in the system, like grub, init scripts or Xserver. Firstaidkit is designed to automatically fix problems while focusing on maintaining user data integrity. In other words, Firstaidkit will try its best to fix your system while giving you the possibility to revert the changes.”

Glitch Free Audio

“The PulseAudio sound server has been rewritten to use timer-based audio scheduling instead of the traditional interrupt-driven approach. This is the approach that is taken by other systems such as Apples CoreAudio and the Windows Vista audio subsystem and has a number of advantages, not the least in reduced power consumption, minimization of drop-outs and flexible adjustment of the latency to the needs of the application.”

Sugar Desktop

From the very beginning, Red Hat and Fedora have worked closely with the OLPC project. And now, in an effort to help gain wider attention and use of the innovative, child focused Sugard desktop environment (which children prefer, by all accounts), Fedora Project members have worked hard to package it along with some useful activities so that you can easily use it on your Fedora system.

It’s a great way to get involved with the development of this project, and more activities are being packaged all the time. If you’d like to try it out, all you have to do is install the sugar-desktop group. If you’d like to help out with development, check out this wiki page.

Sugar home screen, from laptop.org

Improved Codec Support

This feature links very well with the arrival of RPM Fusion, and sees the addition of dependencies to GStreamer that will point to restricted codecs when they’re needed for playback. If the user has RPM Fusion enabled PackageKit will automatically find and install the appropriate codecs for the media you’re trying to play.

Fedora 10 codec installation

Better Webcam Support

Hans De Goede has been working extremely hard to make sure that if a driver that supports a webcam exists for Linux (and for most webcams, a driver does exist), it will work out of the box in Fedora. In the past this hasn’t always been the case, either because the drivers have been outside of the mainline kernel, or because they use V4L2, while many applications will only work with V4L1. Now, many more webcam drivers are in the upstream kernel, and huge numbers of random and esoteric applications will work with the drivers.

More!

These are only the features that have been developed by Fedora Project members, and are largely targeted at desktop users. Beyond these, there’s the usual array of the latest and greatest versions of upstream software, along with a significant number of features that are aimed at making the lives of developers and system administrators easier. You can check out the full feature list here, and you can download the preview release here.

Expect to see many of these features cropping up in other distributions in 6 months to a years time.