The Fedora Project has made the first and only alpha version of Fedora 16 available to download. It was originally scheduled for release a week ago, but was delayed a week due to a series of problems. As a result, Fedora has also put back all subsequent scheduling by 7 days, so that Fedora 16 (named after Jules Verne) is, barring further delays, now expected to arrive on 1 November.



The alpha version of Fedora 16 uses a pre-release version of GNOME 3.2 The feature freeze is already in place, so that the alpha should contain all major changes in a testable form. These include the switch to the GRUB2 boot loader, which, though officially still under development, has long been used by other distributions.

The alpha uses Linux kernel 3.0, but versions released from late September or early October are expected to move to version 3.1. It includes the alpha version of KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.7.0, and GNOME 3.1.5 will provide a foretaste of GNOME 3.2. The development team has also replaced further init scripts with systemd units. Systemd replaced upstart in Fedora 15. The planned switch to using Btrfs as the default file system has been deferred to a future version.

(crve)