This week the Fedora Project announced it’s newest release, Fedora 16, which upgraded to the Gnome 3.2 desktop and includes enhancements for virtualization tools and cloud features.

Here are some of the main points of interest in the “Verne” release:

  • GNOME 3.2 includes an “Online Accounts” panel in System Settings, which provides
    a central point for managing online accounts like Google and Facebook.
  • A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy,
    Evolution, and the new “Online Accounts” settings panel
  • A new document management application provides a simpler

    alternative to traditional file management for both local and “in-cloud”

    documents.

  • Perl 5.14; GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing
    with the C internals of GCC; and D.: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.
  • GRUB2
  • Improved virtualization tools, including Virt-manager guest inspection which allow sread-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry and locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk
    being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.
  • Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.
  • OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
  • Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high availability for cloud environments.
  • HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.

Check out a more detailed feature list.

Download options of the latest version of Fedora are here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora along with the installation guide and release notes.