Fedora 18

The DVD attached to this issue comes with Fedora 18, the latest release from the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project. Fedora is famous as the test bed for innovations that will one day make their way into Red Hat's enterprise-grade distributions.

Fedora continues its emphasis on cloud computing with improved support for the OpenStack and Eucalyptus cloud frameworks, along with enhancements to the oVirt virtual machine management tool. Desktop choices include Gnome 3.6 and KDE Plasma 4.9, as well as Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce 4.10. The new System Storage Manager (SSM) tool offers a unified, command-line view of devices, volumes, storage pools, and snapshots, and a collection of new storage management tools simplifies administration of network-attached storage and storage area networks. The newest Fedora also includes Samba 4, which provides a complete implementation of the Active Directory protocols for better integration with Microsoft networks.