Community is key with Fedora. As the free, open-source, home-oriented version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project relies on the developer and tester community to keep the operating system to its semiannual release schedule. A new version of the OS, Fedora 11, was released today and is available for download.

In terms of major upgrades, Fedora 11 has received several. PackageKit, the software management application introduced in Fedora 9, has been extended from automatically installing new codecs when they're needed to also include new fonts and Internet media types. Audio and video setup has been improved with Fedora 11, which now includes the PulseAudio sound server to simplify audio control; and the Kernel Modsetting feature (KMS) for expedited graphical boot has been expanded to include more graphics processors from Intel, Nvidia, and ATI.

Fingerprint scanning has been simplified into a single authentication mechanism, and package updating has been simplified with the inclusion of Presto, a yum plugin that lessens the amount of data that has to be downloaded for updates.

Fedora 11 also now uses ext4 as the default file system instead of ext3, and also includes improved virtual console, better support for Asian languages with the iBus input method, and the WinGW cross-compiler for developers.

Testing in beta for this release is the Fedora Community portal, which lets developers and contributors more closely interact with the community through a dashboard that tracks the latest contributions, conversations, and updates through a graphical front end.