In announcement made today on the Fedora mailing list, project leader Paul W. Frields announced that Fedora 11—the next major version of the popular Linux distribution—will be codenamed Leonidas.

According to the codename proposal wiki page, Leonidas was a "ship in the Union navy." What the Fedora developers failed to realize, however, is that the USS Leonidas was a derelict vessel that the Union army obtained to intentionally sink. It was part of the Stone Fleet, a group of antiquated whaling ships that the Union army loaded with stone and sank in Charleston Harbor in order to impede blockade runners.

The Fedora crew is salvaging a bit of their dignity by saying that the name came from Sparta's King Leonidas, who was slain valiantly defending Greece at the Battle of Thermopylae. It's not exactly a happy ending either, but at least Sparta's Leonidas had an opportunity to go down fighting.

Leonidas, which is already under active development, will be released in May. Several features are already planned. It will also include Presto by default, a new plugin for Yum that will allow the package manager to download the parts that have changed instead of entire packages during system updates.

The developers are also integrating DeviceKit, a new hardware abstraction layer that simplifies device management. Other new features include a new volume control user interface that leverages PulseAudio, faster boot time, KDE 4.2, and Python 2.6.

The Fedora developers have gathered in Boston at the FUDCon event this week, where they are collaborating on development and discussing emerging Linux technologies. You can get some first-hand perspectives on FUDCon at the Planet Fedora web site.