The Fedora Project has made the first and only alpha version of Fedora 15, aka Lovelock, available to download. The pre-release version of the popular Linux distribution is a week later than originally scheduled. When the delay was announced, it was not expected to affect the final release date, but this has now been put back by a week to May 17.



Windows can still be minimised and maximised via a pop-up menu. With feature freeze having taken place a month ago, the alpha contains at least the core of all new features scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 15, an overview of which can be found in the release notes and feature list. The distribution will now use LibreOffice as its office suite – Fedora was one of the first distributions to make the switch to the OpenOffice.org alternative back in October last year. The alpha includes a Linux 2.6.38 release candidate as its kernel and uses a pre-release version of GCC 4.6. Responsibility for booting is taken up by Systemd, an alternative to SysVinit and Upstart. Systemd was in the running for use in both Fedora 14 and openSUSE 11.4, but was eventually dropped from both.

The most striking change in Lovelock and one which is sure to fuel plenty of discussion is the switch to GNOME 3, which breaks with many of the concepts that GNOME users, and computer users in general, have become used to over many years. The title bar, for example, now just has a button for closing applications and none for minimising or maximising windows.



The application selector in Fedora 15's GNOME Shell.

The Fedora development team has nominated this Thursday as the second GNOME 3 Test Day, on which the desktop environment will be tested to within an inch of its life. Some Fedora developers are already looking ahead to Fedora 16 and are calling for name suggestions for the distribution, which is scheduled for release in November.

See also:

Announcing the release of Fedora 15 Alpha!!, mailing list release announcement.

(crve)