The Fedora Project Team announced, a few minutes ago, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1. Xfce 4.6.0 is also available from the repositories. Fedora takes a bold step into the future by defaulting the hard-disk installation to the powerful Ext4 filesystem and including the promising Btrfs as an additional option.

The PackageKit is now capable to install firmware either by user input or by assessing the system requirements and choosing what's best for your machine. Developers in need of a cross-compiler will be happy to hear that Fedora 11 Beta ships with a preview version of the MiniGW development platform. Speaking of which, the NetBeans 6.5 integrated development environment is also included and brings a lot of changes compared to the 6.1 release. GCC 4.4, Python 2.6 and Git 1.6.2 are also part of this beta release of the upcoming Fedora 11 (Leonidas) operating system.

Leaving technicalities aside, you should find out that Fedora 11 Beta has a brand new wallpaper featuring the famous Greek Acropolis, to be in tone with Fedora 11's codename, Leonidas. Moreover, a Clearlooks-based theme is in testings (see the first screenshot below). Without futher ado, we will let you enjoy the screenshot tour of Fedora 11 Beta.

Fedora 11 Beta GNOME Edition

Fedora 11 Beta KDE Edition

The Fedora 11 development will continue with a Preview release at the end of April and the final release at the end of May, 2009.

Fedora 11 Release Schedule:

February 5th, 2009 - Fedora 11 Alpha Release
March 24th, 2009 - Fedora 11 Beta Release
April 28th, 2009 - Fedora 11 Preview Release
May 26th, 2009 - Fedora 11 Final Release

Download Fedora 11 Beta right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only! Please test it and report bugs to the Fedora Bug Tracker.