Fedora 15 Lovelock is out now!

Today a new version of one of the most popular Linux distros has been released: Fedora 15, Lovelock. This version incorporates a LOT of new features that you cannot miss: GNOME 3, support for BTRFS, systemd, dynamic firewalls, and a long etcetera.

Fedora 15 Lovelock arrives with a radical change in the desktop environment: from GNOME 2.32 we went to GNOME 3 and its particular GNOME Shell, an interface that proposes a very different user paradigm from the one we used until now and that we will have to get to know each time best.

For those of you who are not familiar with GNOME Shell yet, here is a short but excellent video showing some of its main features.

In case your hardware does not support GNOME Shell, the classic GNOME 3 will run, as we see in the screenshot below:

Fedora is also the first distro to include systemd, a services and systems manager, which will replace SysVinit and Upstart, which results in a significant reduction in system startup time.

Fedora 15 also includes support for the Btrfs file system, which is not chosen by default for installation but is available when managing your partitions during the installation process.

The crash and error reporting system, ABRT, has also been improved, along with more efficient troubleshooting with SELinux.

It comes with the following packages installed by default: Firefox 4 (4.0.1), Nautilus 3.0.1.1, Empathy 3.0.1, Rhythmbox 2.90.1, Evolution 3.0.1, Shotwell 0.9.2 or Deja Dup 18.1.1, Transmission 2.22 , Totem 3.0.1, Linux Kernel 2.6.38.6, GCC 4.6, Python 3.2.

Another new feature is the default addition of a "dynamic firewall". This is probably not a feature of greater interest to regular users, but it will definitely make more than one administrator happy as dynamic firewalls allow you to change their settings without having to restart them.

You can find these and many more details in the official announcement and release notes.