After the bad publicity of a security hole in its servers, Red Hat has better news to crow about. The latest version of its Fedora OS is out and from the rave reviews, Fedora 10 looks like it might give Ubuntu serious competition.

The Register is all enthused about Fedora 10 in its review. Says Scott Gilbertson: “If you’ve never given Fedora a try, now is a great time. The tenth revision is slick and stable and it has a rock solid feel to it that, for our money, trumps even Ubuntu’s latest release.”

On the surface, Fedora 10 does have things in common with Ubuntu such as the latest GNOME version as well as the NetworkManager utility. It’s now possible to share your Internet connection with other users, and other little tweaks to the system make it an impressive update to the last version.

Virtualization is highlighted in this release, which will appeal to network admins. The new OS also boots faster thanks to an optimized new graphical boot system called Plymouth.

There are security tweaks (of course), with the SecTool auditing and detection kit being one highlight of the system. Users can use it to see if a configuration has any flaws, as well as build their own security tests.

PackageKit, introduced in Fedora 9, returns. A software installation and updating system, it promises better media handling, according to a Fedora Team blogpost.

“In Fedora 10, PackageKit now detects when the user opens an audio or video media file, and offers to search for codecs used to play that file.” Once authorised, the kit will search software repositories on the system and installs needed codecs to play the media. The same facility will be applied to fonts and other applications in the near future.

Fedora also boasts “support for more hardware than any other operating system.” But wait…isn’t most hardware optimized to run Windows? Anyway, judging from the tweaks and Red Hat’s commitment to the project, Fedora 10 could very well be a panacea to cure the Ubuntu weary and set another new benchmark for other distros to follow. If you’re already using Fedora 9, there is little justification for you not to upgrade.

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Entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 10:08 pm under Linux.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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