Fedora 18
Today, January 15, the long-awaited release of Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) took place. Initially, the release was scheduled for November, but due to problems with the Anaconda installer, it was decided to postpone the release to January.
Fedora 18 is a very important release for both the Fedora project and Red Hat, as it will be the basis for RHEL 7, which is scheduled for release in the second half of 2013.
Key innovations
- The Anaconda installer has been completely rewritten to simplify the interface, as well as add some new features. Netinstall excludes the option to select individual packages, but package groups (for example, GNOME or X.Org Server) are saved.
- “Offline” updates when using GNOME Shell, systemd and PackageKit. Updates to key system components (kernel, glibc, xorg) will take place at the initial stage of loading in order to avoid conflicts with already running applications. This innovation will only affect GNOME Shell users and will not affect devotees of other DEs.
- For the first time, DNF is included in the main repository - an experimental package manager, which is a fork of Yum 3.4. The advantages are less code base, increased performance and lower memory consumption compared to yum.
- Update RPM to version 4.10.
- Support 256 colors in the terminal.
- Secure Boot Support.
- Starting with F18, RAM will be used to store / tmp data, which will bring such improvements as a reduced number of write / read operations (positively affect the life of the SSD), increased performance, improved power saving, and complete destruction of temporary data upon reboot.
- Enabling Avahi by default .
- Inclusion of ownCloud cloud service in the system .
- Using default firewalld
DE updates
- As the main environment in Fedora 18, GNOME 3.6 is used, in which pleasant improvements are noticeable, such as bringing the GTK2 and GTK3 applications to a single appearance, restoring alacarte (the menu editor that was broken with GNOME 3.2 more than a year ago), the new GDM boot screen, as well as a significant redesign of the Nautilus interface. For users who are unhappy with the latest changes to Nautilus, there is also good news - Nemo (fork of nautilus 3.4) is present in the main Fedora 18 repository.
- Mate and Cinnamon are now basically Fedora repositories. These components were already included in the summer and are available for manual installation in Fedora 17, but from now on it will be possible to get them out of the box. Mate also plans to create a separate Spin (official LiveCD, similar to KDE / Xfce).
- Upgrading KDE to version 4.9. It is also worth mentioning that KDE 4.9 is currently available in F17 as well. Fedora tries to use the latest versions of this environment in current releases, if possible. Thus, it is possible that KDE 4.10 will soon appear in the main Fedora 18 repository.
- Update Xfce to version 4.10.
Screenshots
Here we see the transferred “Applications” menu - now it opens by clicking on the square of 9 points on the left. The search bar is now in the center at the top:
Updated Nautilus:
Redesigned GDM interface:
And now the screensaver window looks:
To log into the system (or display the password entry window), you can move this screen up or press Esc. As a background, the currently used desktop image is automatically picked up.
Update
Upgrading to F18 using preupgrade now fails, because fedup became the only supported upgrade method . Fedora 16 and lower users are advised to upgrade to F17 using preupgrade and later to F18 using fedup.
Download
Torrent:
Fedora 18 Live GNOME : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live KDE : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live Xfce : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live LXDE : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 DVD : i386 x86_64
FTP:
Fedora 18 Netinstall : i386 x86_64