14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora Project has released the first Beta for Fedora 21, taking this distribution a lot closer to the final version, which should land in a little over a month.
The Fedora developers have managed to overcome the blockers that have prevented them from getting this latest release out the door, and following a few delays, a new testable version is now ready for download.
Now that the Beta build is out, users can start looking forward to the stable iteration of the distro, which should arrive in December if nothing else goes wrong. The devs still have a few bugs to fix, but it doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary.
Also, most of the packages are already in place, so it's unlikely that anything major that can delay the launch will pop up. In any case, the Fedora devs will make sure that users get a working release and that they are not rushing a release out the door just to be on time.
Fedora is now separated into Cloud, Server, and Workstation
Fedora 21 is the first in the series to no longer have a name. Some of the previous code names were loved by the community, others not so much. In fact, the community was the one choosing them, but it's not the same anymore. The devs have decided to split the project into Cloud, Server, and Workstation. The names are pretty obvious and they point at the usage. Regular users will want the Workstation edition, which is designed for the desktop.
"The beta release is the last important milestone before the release of Fedora 21. A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates up to the general release of Fedora 21," say the Fedora developers.
The Fedora distribution is based on GNOME, but there are a few spins available as well. These are official flavors that use other desktop environments, like KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, and SoaS (Sugar on a Stick).
Check the official announcement for more details about this Beta release. You can download Fedora 21 Beta right now from Softpedia. This is a Live CD and it should work just fine from a USB key or inside a virtual environment, like VirtualBox. The installer works very well, but the build is still in development and it's not recommended to use a production machine.
