For a while, new versions of Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora, were frequently delayed. In the last year, Fedora has returned to fast releases. The next version, Fedora 23, is now out in beta.

This new edition comes in three different editions: Fedora 23 Cloud Beta, Fedora 23 Server Beta and Fedora 23 Workstation Beta. This follows in the footsteps of May's Fedora 22 release.

As with other Fedora releases under the Fedora.next initiative, all Fedora 23 Beta editions are built from a base set of packages. These include the 4.3.0 Linux kernel, RPM, systemd and Anaconda. This release also includes updated package manager and replacement for Yum, "DNF."

According to Fedora's developers, "While many updates and enhancements have been made to these base packages, one of the most significant updates is the use of compiler flags to help improve security by 'hardening' Fedora 23 Beta binaries against memory corruption vulnerabilities, buffer overflows and other similar issues. In short, Fedora 23 is being tweaked for better system security."

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The biggest change in Fedora 23 Server Beta is a new web-server cache, which uses memcached. Facebook created this open-source high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. This program is used by most of the biggest interactive web sites.

This release also includes numerous system management and administration updates. Many of these are in Cockpit, Red Hat's web-based system administration console. Some of the key changes to Cockpit include:

A basic cluster dashboard for Kubernetes, Google's container manager.

Support for SSH key authentication and support for configuring user accounts with their authorized keys

Fedora 23 desktop users will find a new interface: the preview release of GNOME 3.18. While I have no fondness for the GNOME 3.x series, I know some people like it. GNOME 3.18 is in late beta and the final version should be out before Fedora 23 goes final in late October.

The new desktop will also come with LibreOffice 5, the best open-source office suite. Fedora 23 will also include the latest bits of Wayland, the new Linux graphics server and replacement for X Window. Wayland, however, is still not ready to be the default graphical server .

Sound interesting to you? You can take Fedora 23 Beta for a spin today.

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