It's powered by the Linux 4.18 kernel series

Sep 26, 2018 19:55 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat and the Fedora Project announced the availability of the beta release of the upcoming Fedora 29 Linux operating system, a major version expected to arrive later this fall.

Fedora 29 has been in development for the past several months, since the May 1, 2018, release of Fedora 28, and it's being built based on the recently released GNOME 3.30 desktop environment for the main Workstation edition, as well as the Linux 4.18 kernel series. And now, the beta release of Fedora 29 is now available for public testing.

As expected, users willing to try out the Fedora 29 beta release will get a first taste of the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, but Fedora 29 also includes numerous other new open source technologies like GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.28, Python 3.7, Perl 5.28. MySQL 8, and Golang 1.11.

The Raspberry Pi (ARM) support has been improved as well in this release, which introduces ZRAM support for SWAP  partitions on ARMv7 and AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) architectures. Other than that, Fedora 29 expands the modular repositories introduced in Fedora 28 to all official editions, including the Fedora Spins and Labs.

"Fedora 28 introduced modular repositories for Fedora Server Edition. For Fedora 29 Beta, modularity is available in all Editions, Spins, and Labs. Modularity makes multiple versions of important packages available in parallel and it will work with  the same DNF you already know," Eduard Lucena writes in the release announcement.

Fedora 29 expected to hit the streets at the end of October 2018

Among other noteworthy changes implemented in the upcoming Fedora 29 release, which is expected to hit the streets at the end of October 2018, either on the 23rd or the 30th, according to the official release schedule, the Fedora Atomic Workstation has been rebranded as Fedora Silverblue and the GRUB bootloader menu is now hidden by default on PCs where only Fedora is installed.

If you're anxious to try out the Fedora 29 operating system on your personal computer, you can download the Fedora 29 beta release right now through our Linux software portal or from the official website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don't install it on a production machine, nor deploy it on production environments.