After the one week delay, the first alpha of Fedora 14 codenamed “Laughlin” has been released today.

Not much has changed in Fedora 14 Alpha in terms of the looks since Fedora 13. However there are a lot of changes under the hood. Some important changes includes the inclusion systemd and ROOT.

Here is a brief description of some of the new features:

systemd

One of the biggest changes in Fedora 14 is the inclusion of systemd. systemd is a system and session manager for Linux. In the previous release Fedora used the Canonical developed upstart. However with Fedora 14, they are replacing upstart with systemd because they believe that it is faster and offers more features. If you are interested, you can read more about systemd here.

Introduction of ROOT

This is another very big new feature in Fedora 14. Fedora 14 Alpha supports ROOT, an obejct-oriented, open-source platform for data acquisition, simulation and data analysis developed by CERN.

Introduction of D

Fedora 14 now ships with D, an object-oriented system programming language. Currently most of the D compilers directly generates machine codes for efficient execution.

Other programing languages like Perl, Python etc. have also been updated.

New JPEG library

The old JPEG library libjpeg has been replaced by libjpeg-turbo. This will greatly increase the performance of any application handling JPEG images.

Desktop Environment

Fedora 14 Alpha includes the pre-release version of GNOME 2.32. It also includes KDE Software Compilation 4.5 and Sugar 0.90.

Security

Fedora 14 Alpha has support for SCAP. SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) allows users to scan their system to check whether it complies with a defined security configuration.

SPICE

Fedora 14 Alpha includes SPICE. SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment) is an open source solution for interacting with virtual desktops.

You can read more about the new features in Fedora 14 Alpha here.

If you want to test it, the download link is given below.

Download Fedora 14 Alpha