Fedora 12 Alpha!

Today marks the Fedora 12 Alpha release, hot off the presses! You can pick up a copy to try all the latest technologies here:

//fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

I’ve been running the Alpha version for about a week or so on one of my home machines. While there are some minor foibles here and there, most of it seems to be working like gangbusters — and better than ever. The PackageKit “command-not-found” plugin is pretty cool, and I’m also enjoying some of the other sweet new features like the new Virtualization Manager upgrades.

Not everything is guaranteed to work perfectly, because there are some pretty new bits in there. But we do encourage people to at least grab a Live ISO image and run it from a CD or USB stick. And of course, it’s very important that you FILE A BUG if you find something that’s wrong! Remember kids, Twitter and Identi.ca are not substitutes for good open source practices — they’re a good way to encourage people to check your work, though, if you’re looking for a second opinion. I hope everyone trying F12 Alpha will blog a little bit about the bits they find that they like — and if you don’t like something, tell us about that too, and let us know how it can be made better. Then file a bug about it!

You can tell I’m big on the bug filing today. That’s because we seriously want your help in testing the release. Yours, and everyone you know! The more problems we can find and knock out before the Beta, the better Fedora 12 “Constantine” will shine in November! I, for one, started using the command-line bugzilla client for doing this quite often, and it’s very convenient when I’m in a terminal or otherwise not using a Web browser. You just run bugzilla login and bugzilla new — the latter with a bunch of required options — and you’ll get a reply with your bug number assigned.

I hope you enjoy this very early sneak preview of what’s coming Fedora 12! And thanks as always to our awesome Release Engineering and Infrastructure teams for their usual fantastic job at getting Fedora out the door into the hands of our millions of users.

Speaking of which: Only 10 weeks into our release, our latest stable offering, Fedora 11 “Leonidas,” has surpassed one million registered updating IP addresses, as noted on our statistics page. That’s almost 40% higher than our uptake from the previous and very well-regarded Fedora 10 release. I also see that our number of completely unique IP addresses registered for updatesm from Fedora 7 through Rawhide is now at slightly over 15 million for the first time. There’s some helpful information floating around about how that might translate to user numbers, but for my part, I just love being able to just look up these numbers in our completely open and transparent infrastructure — another reason to enjoy being part of a project dedicated to building 100% free software for you and yours.

Sad daily confessional: I meant to have this out in the morning but the upcoming Red Hat Summit has me hopping more than usual. Sorry about the delay and hope to see you in Chicago next week!

Update: Fixed the “sweet new features” link above, thanks Rahul!