Takeaway: Fedora 18 is finally here (as
of Jan. 15). Jack Wallen takes a look at some of the included features
and draws the conclusion that the wait for Spherical Cow might well make
up for the delay.
What’s really interesting about this is that, thanks to a number of issues, Fedora had nearly worked its way into a perpetual state of irrelevancy. With Ubuntu making incredible headway in user-friendliness and acceptance, a “cutting edge” distribution like Fedora, who couldn’t even manage a proper release, was bound to fade away, like so much Caldera.
But then Fedora 18 finds a release date and prepares itself to show up to that party with some features that could easily bring it back to prominence. At this stage in the game, when Linux has become so user-friendly and powerful, what kind of features could a “sand box” Linux distribution offer? Let’s take a look at some of the features that might open the eyes of many a skeptic.
Active Directory
Out of the box, Fedora 18 will be able to join a Windows Active Directory. You read that correctly — out of the box, it should be easy for any user to add a Fedora 18 machine to an Active Directory Domain and then log into that domain with their credentials. This is a feature that has been necessary for a long, long time. I would like to think other distributions would pick up on this, but major kudos to Fedora for finally having the smarts to make this a reality for users.Avahi
This isn’t really new. Other distributions use this feature that allows the desktop to use MDNS shared printers and other MDNS devices. With Fedora 18, this will be enabled by default. Joining Avahi and the ability to join an Active Directory, you can see that Fedora 18 will make the migration to a business environment incredibly easy.Eucalyptus
Fedora 18 brings a cloud computing software platform to light. For use as a private Infrastructure (as Service clouds), Eucalyptus uses existing infrastructure to create scalable and secure AWS-compatible cloud resources for compute, network and storage.Mate
For those who want to steer clear of GNOME 3, and aren’t fans of KDE, you have a choice. With Fedora 18, the addition of the Mate desktop, Fedora users can enjoy a more traditional desktop metaphor. Mate is a fork of GNOME 2 and should keep those displeased with GNOME 3 happy for a long, long time.NetworkManager Hotspots
If you have a need to share your network connection out to other users, this new feature should make that process far easier. Thought it does have some limitations (one major one being that the kernel does not work reliably in WPA/WPA2 Ad-Hoc mode, leading to supposedly secure networks being created as insecure ones), this feature should evolve fairly quickly into a must-have for a large number of users.Secure Boot
That’s right, Fedora 18 shouldn’t have any problem working with that dreadful Windows 8 secure boot.Storage Management
Spherical Cow will offer a set of tools to make it easier to manage Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS).Team Driver
Network Team Driver allows you to bond multiple network interface cards together. These bonded NICs will act as one and can handle such features as:- load balancing for LACP
- separate per-port link monitoring setup
- port priorities and stickiness
- IPv6 Neighbor Solicitation/Neighbor Advertisement link monitoring
~ Jack Wallen
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