Red Hat has released a new version of its open source operating system, which includes Ogg Theora video, virtualization improvements and advancements to NetworkManager.
According to Red Hat, the Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, which is expected to enhance the quality of free video. The Ogg Theora video offers vibrant media, enabling users to stream and download video while using open software, codecs and formats.
The company claims that the Network Manager improvements in Fedora 12 allows users to be online using mobile broadband, or configure servers or other special situations.
In addition, the virtualisation-releated features include, better virtual disk performance and storage discovery, hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption, and a network booting infrastructure, Red Hat said.
Other features in Fedora 12 are PackageKit command-line and browser plugins; file compression to save disk space and time; libguestfs, which allows administrators to work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without booting those guests; SystemTap 1.0 that helps developers trace and gather information for writing and debugging programs, as well as integration with the Eclipse IDE and NetBeans 6.7.1.
Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat, said: “Fedora always looks to include the latest cutting-edge features in its distribution and we believe that Fedora 12 stays true to this pattern, packing a lot of punch across its feature set.
“Our community of global contributors continues to expand, with about 25% growth in Fedora accounts since the release of Fedora 11. We’ve also seen more than 2.3m installations of Fedora 11 thus far, which is a 20% increase over the previous release.”