After a two-week delay, the Fedora Project team finally announced, two minutes ago, the release of Fedora 11, also known as Leonidas. The multitude of new features and improvements in this new version made the waiting time seem even longer, especially for dedicated fans. Well, at least the buzz from Ubuntu and Mandriva is slowly fading away, so Linux users can concentrate better on Fedora 11.

Coming on a single Live CD, Leonidas can be downloaded either with the GNOME desktop environment or the KDE one. Moreover, spins are available for the Xfce lightweight alternative and other specific purposes such as education or lab work.

Here are the main features in Fedora 11:

· 20-second boot time - from the moment you turn on the computer to the login screen; shutdown times were also reduced;
· Default EXT4 install - the Fedora team took quite a bold step as the installation now defaults to this powerful new filesystem; experimental Btrfs support is also available;
· New artwork - beautifully designed from boot to the desktop: birds, wavy ribbons and dark blues are part of the new theme;
· Plymouth - offers beautiful, next generation graphical boot animation;
· KDE 4.2.2 - the latest and greatest K Desktop Environment with all its eye-candy included
· GNOME 2.26.1 - though there are no major changes, users will notice Brasero as the default CD/DVD burning tool, some minor interface tweaks, improved filesharing, better Microsoft Outlook support in Evolution and more;


· Xfce 4.6 - many new features make the lightweight desktop environment much more efficient and production-ready;
· Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer - enables third-party programs to automatically install required fonts, codecs or clipart;
· Fingerprint reading - devices that provide this feature are supported in Fedora 11 out of the box and configuring them can be easily done through the Authentication Configuration utility;
· ABRT - the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool is a very easy way to report bugs;
· Nouveau - the open source Nvidia driver is now enabled by default;
· Presto - updating the system will be much quicker as this yum plugin brings support for deltarpms, ensuring that only changed components are downloaded, not the whole packages;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta - a plethora of enhancements to the most popular open-source browser makes this a great choice;


· Thunderbird 3 Beta - a great email client with improved performance and better IMAP support;
· Xserver 1.6 - bringing improved performance and stability;
· MiniGW - Windows cross-compiling has never been easier;
· TigerVNC - now the default VNC client;
· GCC 4.4, NetBeans 6.5, Python 2.6 and Git 1.6.2 are sure to increase development productivity;
· OpenChange - out-of-the-box Microsoft Exchange access;
· Improved Volume Control, now more user-friendly with per-application control and better handling of multiple speaker sets;
· DeviceKit system service, providing better ways to monitor disks through the Palimpsest utility.


Download Fedora 11 right now from Softpedia.