There are only a few days until the 7th release of Fedora Linux distribution will be made available to general public, and I thought it would be nice to overview some of its highlights. While the development team behind the Fedora Project is working very hard to bring you the most exciting features and hottest technologies, the main question is: Can Fedora 7 rise to Ubuntu's level? Well, like always, people will decide that, and personally, as an ex-Fedora user, I am very sorry to say this, but I don't think Fedora will rise at the level of Ubuntu right now.

Returning to Fedora, this 7th release promises hot new features, such as:

￭ Rock solid wireless networking support;
￭ Wireless firmware;
￭ Pungi will be used for tree building;
￭ Fast user switching;
￭ RandR 1.2;
￭ KVM virtualization support;
￭ Boot and shutdown speed-up;
￭ New init system;
￭ rpm and yum enhancements;
￭ libata will be used for PATA support;
￭ syslog to be replaced with syslog-ng;
￭ Improved firewire support;
￭ Real-time kernel;
￭ Tickless kernel support;
￭ Fix wakeups across the distribution;
￭ Encrypted file systems.

Max Spevack, the Fedora Project Leader, announced the "European Launch" of Fedora 7 at LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin. "The community of folks in Europe who care deeply about Fedora is definitely a bright spot. [..] For those of you in Europe who will attend LinuxTag, I look forward to seeing you there.".

The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products and it is not a supported product of Red Hat.

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community in order to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule.

Until Fedora 7 is available, you can download Fedora Core 6 now from Softpedia.