Also available for Power64 and 64-bit ARM (AArch64)

Aug 30, 2016 17:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, August 30, 2016, the Fedora Project has been pleased to announce the immediate availability for download and public testing of the Alpha pre-release build of the upcoming Fedora 25 operating system.

The biggest new feature of the Fedora 25 Alpha milestone is the migration to the next-generation Wayland display server in addition to X11 (a.k.a. X.Org Server), which is enabled by default on systems that support it, but it's available only for the Workstation edition that's built around the GNOME desktop environment.

Talking about GNOME, Fedora 25 Alpha ships with the GNOME 3.21.4 development build of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, though some packages are at GNOME 3.20.2. Most probably, this version will soon be upgraded to the current milestone, namely GNOME 3.22 Beta, as well as the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.22 Beta 2, which is expected tomorrow, August 31, 2016.

"The Alpha release contains all the features of Fedora 25's editions in a form that anyone can help test," says Dennis Gilmore in today's announcement. "This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release."

Powered by Linux kernel 4.8

Taking a quick look under the hood of Fedora 25 Alpha, we can notice that it's powered by the second Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel. Again, Linux kernel 4.8 RC2 is not the latest development milestone available, as Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the fourth RC just a couple of days ago, so those who feel adventurous and want to test Fedora 25 Alpha should get a kernel upgrade too.

The development cycle of the Fedora 25 Linux operating system will continue next month with the Beta release, which should be ready for download around the date of October 27, if no other delays occur in the release schedule. After that, the final release of Fedora 25 could launch in mid-November, but until then, you can now download the Fedora 25 Alpha ISO images for 64-bit, 32-bit, PowerPC64, and AArch64 platforms.

Fedora 25 Alpha with GNOME 3.21.4
Fedora 25 Alpha with GNOME 3.21.4

Fedora 25 Alpha (2 Images)

Fedora 25 Alpha
Fedora 25 Alpha with GNOME 3.21.4
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