14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora 14 Beta has been released. The first and only beta of the upcoming Fedora 14 is mostly feature-complete and all the updates now will focus on bug fixing and stability issues. Fedora 14 comes with a slightly shorter new features list than previous releases.
"Mark your calendars, and get ready to break out and have some fun: Fedora 14 will launch in early November," Dennis Gilmore announced the date of release for the upcoming Fedora 14.
"Fedora is the leading-edge, community-developed, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to users worldwide, with a new release every six months," explains the Red Hat engineer.
"But... what's that, you say? November is oh, so, far away? Never fear - Beta is here! Checking out the latest and greatest in Fedora's cutting-edge technologies is just a click away," he announced.
Fedora developers say that the beta release should be considered stable enough for wide use, but lingering bugs may still be affecting it which is what this testing phase aims to determine.
Apart from updated packages, like KDE SC 4.5 and GNOME 2.32, Fedora 14 comes with few new features for the end users. System admins will enjoy the several new technologies included in Fedora 14.
The one feature geared towards end users is the implementation of the libjpeg-turbo library which, Fedora says, should cut down the loading times of JPEG files in half.
One new feature planned for Fedora 14, the Systemd start-up system which was proposed as an alternative to SysV-Init and Upstart, was pushed back to Fedora 15. The feature is still available in Fedora 14, but only as a tech preview and is not enabled by default.
Fedora 14 Beta is available for download here on 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 report bugs to the Red Hat Bugzilla.