Fedora 11 hits public release

The final release of Fedora 11 brings with it a host of incremental improvements intended to build on the already solid Fedora 10.

Chief among these is the move to the Ext4 file system, which Fedora claims should improve performance and responsiveness across the board.

Indeed, performance has been something of a buzzword for Leonidas. Red Hat claimed PCs running the OS should hit the login screen in around 20 seconds, which is an impressive feat considering its predecessor was around 10 seconds slower and still felt fairly swift.

Much of the credit for this goes to the Plymouth boot tool introduced six months ago in Fedora 10, but refined here. Plymouth is a kernel mode graphical boot system that speeds up the boot process by redefining how Linux handles graphics cards. Fedora 11 brings with it support for a bunch of older ATI, Nvidia and Intel graphics chips.

The software has also had an overhaul. Fedora 11 includes the Gnome 2.26.1 and KDE 4.2.3 desktop environments, as well as the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 browser and OpenOffice 3.1. Fedora 11's now on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel.

The PackageKit package manager has also been tweaked and can now root out and install missing fonts and codecs if you happen across a file Fedora doesn't recognise.

Another interesting feature is the ability to perform a minimal 500MB install, which should appeal to those looking to set up a server on older hardware. Of course, the 500MB version is seriously light on features and software.