The developers behind the Fedora project have announced the official release of Fedora 17, codenamed Beefy Miracle. The update includes the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment and a number of other improvements.

Fedora is a community-driven Linux distribution that is sponsored by Red Hat. It serves as a testbed for new functionality that is later included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It tends to be closely aligned with the upstream Linux desktop ecosystem and is often slightly ahead of the curve on adopting new technologies.

The new version of Fedora includes GNOME 3.4, which was released at the end of March. As we wrote in our GNOME review, the 3.4 update introduced some significant design changes. The GNOME developers are working to simplify applications, removing menu and toolbar clutter, and moving towards simple layouts that look good when maximized.

You won’t see much of that new design in Fedora 17, however. Only a handful of applications have been converted so far, and not all of them are included out of the box in Fedora 17. One that made the cut is the new Documents application, which uses the Tracker indexing tool to show the user their documents. It can be launched in Fedora 17 from the dock in the Activities overlay.

Another major GNOME improvement that is supported in Fedora 17 is the introduction of software rendering for GNOME Shell. This feature, which is based on LLVMpipe, means that the shell no longer requires hardware-accelerated graphics in order to run properly. This is useful as it ensures users on hardware without good 3D drivers won’t be left behind. Between increasingly-capable open source graphics drivers and the new software rendering fallback, Fedora users no longer have to resort to proprietary binary-only drivers to get a modern desktop.

In addition to GNOME 3.4, the new Fedora update also includes the long-awaited GIMP 2.8 update. The new version of the GIMP, which we reviewed following its release in May, includes a new single-window mode user interface.

Fedora 17 also brings some welcome improvements for servers, including some great updates for OpenStack users. OpenStack is an effort to produce a standardized cloud computing stack that is conducive to building self-hosted elastic clouds. It was launched in 2010 as a joint effort between NASA and Rackspace and has since attracted the support of many other companies. Fedora 17 supports OpenStack Essex, which was released in April with a large number of major changes. The OpenStack Quantum virtual networking service and Horizon Web interface are also supported.

There are a number of major changes under the hood in Fedora 17. One of the most notable is the effort to move some key system folders that have historically been located in the root of the filesystem. The bin, sbin, lib, and lib64 directories are now located in the usr directory in Fedora 17.

Changing the location of these directories offers several advantages. In particular, it will simplify snapshotting for rollbacks and will make it easier to mount the operating system in read-only mode. For backwards compatibility, Fedora 17 will automatically create symlinks in the filesystem root that point to the new locations.

Fedora 17 is available for download from the Fedora project’s official website. In addition to the standard GNOME-based Live CD, they offer a more comprehensive DVD image and a range of variants with other configurations. For more details about the changes, you can refer to the Fedora 17 feature list.