Fedora 11 Released!

I missed the release by a couple of days, but as is my tradition, here is the release notice:

Ladies and gentlemen of the Royal Explorers Club! Your attention please. It falls to me to be the host of our proceedings to-day, as we celebrate a great achievement in the annals of this hallowed organization – the discovery of what is truly a magnificent specimen among all FOSSdom. When Dr. Brattlesworth and I began this safari more than six months ago, we knew full well the many snares, toils, and dangers that awaited us along the hundreds of miles of tracking our quarry across the plains. But we also maintained a steadfast belief that by living with the land, and becoming part of the larger ecosystem where this incredible animal takes refuge, we could record for posterity the way of life of that marvelous creature – the Leonidas!

What’s that? Oh, yes, dear me, the slides. I know you didn’t come all this way to hear my prattle, so let’s say we, ah, get right down to brass tacks as it were! Ho-ho! Yes, here we can see an exquisite scene of the beast at repose, secure in his den, thanks to the mandatory access control enhancements, which the astute among you will know better as “SELinux”, to his virtualization systems. Upon closer inspection of his habitat we reveal further improvements to his virtualization lair, including the merging of KVM and QEMU, stronger VNC authentication for guests and a much enhanced virt-manager. Finally, we were able to determine, as you’ll see in this slide, that our crafty king of beasts has secured his lair using the protection of integrated fingerprint authentication and DNSSEC.

Next slide please, Dr. Brattlesworth – Here, we find the quadruped leaping to action in a flash with its 20-second startup – and do observe the animal’s graceful form, achieved through kernel mode setting and Plymouth. We discovered, upon further examination, that the Leonidas maintains his sleek figure through the help of his new Presto feature, which allows him to keep his bandwidth trim while digesting updates that keep him healthy and content. By this point, Dr. Brattlesworth was positively ecstatic about our discovery, and I had to calm the poor chap down with some of the local fire-water. That was a rum morning, wasn’t it, my dear fellow? Ha ha!

Oh, balderdash, where was I? Ah yes, next slide. Here we see a diagram of the cranial capacity of the average member of his species, compared with that of our subject the Leonidas. Through a form of advanced evolution to which Dr. Brattlesworth and I refer as “Free and Open Source Software Development Methods,” he has developed the sophisticated abilities to comprehend code using GCC 4.4, Python 2.6 and NetBeans 6.5, and to patrol a much larger area of space quickly, using his support for the Ext4 file system

Ah, my favorite slide is next! Here we see the Leonidas at the end of a day as the full moon rises above the plain, safe and sound with his new more understandable and flexible volume control. Oh-ho! Perhaps those among you not asleep in your easy chairs by the fire, or otherwise engaged in deep conversation, sparked no doubt by our fascinating presentation, saw my little play at sonic humour. *ahem* Yes, well.

So now that you have seen the results of our intrepid safari into the land inhabited by the Leonidas – truly a worthy quarry, and a wonder for us to behold, which we are proud to share with you, our colleagues, as always. I hope that you, like I – and I trust my dear fellow adventurer Dr. Brattlesworth – are already eager to return to the veldt and witness the next stage of growth of this superlative creature. Do enjoy your handouts, which are all provided on this marvelous new invention called the ’live compact-disc,’ and which you may feel absolutely confident in passing on to your many associates and other curious passers-by.

Let us adjourn now to the smoking room for our brandy and cigars!

• Fedora-11