Linux Mint 11 and Fedora 15: In One Week, Two Gems Debut

It's not all workweek that sees the launch of a major release from unmatchable of the virtually hot Linux distributions. This week, however, we've had the benefit of non just now one but two so much landmark debuts.

Fedora 15, operating theater "Lovelock," and Linux Mint 11, or "Katya," some ready-made their grand entrances onto the world stage in the ultimo fewer years, giving users of the free and open source Linux operating organization til now more compelling options to choose from.

Wondering what you'll find in these new releases? Here's a rundown of some of their key fruit original features.

Fedora 15 'Lovelock'

Eastern Samoa promised previously, the final dismission of Fedora 15 launched on Tuesday to a circular audience of fans tidal bore to impediment out its implementation of the GNOME 3 desktop.

Linux desktops are a particularly grave subject, of of course, now that the default Unity desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" has proven indeed controversial, and the Fedora team proclaimed that it was abandoning its own Unity efforts more or less time ago. GNOME 3 may be slightly less controversial, but information technology's still generating a lot of discussion.

Other key new features in this latest release from Homburg–which is currently the thirdly to the highest degree popular Linux distribution, reported to DistroWatch–are the availableness of the Btrfs filesystem as a menu item in the installer and improved crash reporting.

A redesigned SELinux trouble shooter is also a part of the new release, as is high compression in inhabit images. Lovelock features better power management as well, thanks in partially to a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption and carrying out.

LibreOffice and Firefox 4 are now included, while updates for systems administrators include a self-propelled firewall, more than consistent network device naming and the BoxGrinder appliance creator. A full list of features is available on the Fedora locate, where the new release is too disposable free of charge download.

Linux Mint 11 'Katya'

Bum only Ubuntu in popularity on DistroWatch's list, Linux Heap is a very easy Ubuntu-based distribution, as I've noted in front. This new release, meanwhile, has been widely awaited or els option for those who aren't enchanted by Ubuntu's One.

Released on Thursday, Linux Mint 11 "Katya" uses neither Ace nor GNOME 3; rather, the plan developers chose to puzzle over with GNOME 2.32 instead, providing a rich and acquainted with option for fans of that screen background environment.

The software is still founded on Ubuntu 11.04, nevertheless, and features one-click installation of multimedia codecs and spear carrier applications. The Software package Manager has been enhanced with user interface improvements, a new splash screen and improved lookup capabilities, while the Update Manager offers break performance too every bit improvements to its interface.

Improvements to the Desktop Settings tool make it more than "desktop-agnostic," the externalise team says, while system improvements include a new "disposed download" overlook and Adobe Heartbeat plugins.

LibreOffice, gThumb and Banshee are among the default option applications in Katya, which is available for unoccupied download on the Linux Mint land site.

Hear that sound in the distance? It's the ranks of the Linux-victimisation masses growing even big. Weekend project: take these two new gems for a dedication-free try out drive.