Fedora 11, the next release of the popular Linux distribution, is now available from the Fedora website. You can find full details of the major improvements and changes in this latest release in our previous post about the launch of Fedora 11, but to mention just a few, the release claims to have major speed improvements, boasting a 20 second startup, as well as overall speed improvements as ext4 is now used as the default file-system.
Another interesting feature is the ability to perform a minimal install, which amounts to about 500MB (at mount-point "/"), which should make this release more appealing to users running servers, or machines with older hardware. However, this does of course come at the cost of features.
In addition, the latest versions of GNOME and KDE are included with the respective versions. The release was delayed several times due to last minute issues, however it is now officially available. You can see the screenshot tour here, showing the installation process and the desktops for both GNOME and KDE.
The release is now available through BitTorrent and direct download, however, at the time of writing, not all mirrors had Fedora 11 to download, so you may be better off using torrents if you cannot find a mirror. Custom Fedora 11 spins are also available, including the Fedora Games Spin and Fedora Xfce spin.
For those wishing to upgrade, you must be using version 10 in order to upgrade to Fedora 11 through Yum. Users running Fedora 9 must upgrade to version 10 first, because of this. In case you aren"t familiar with Fedora, it is a free, open-source Linux operating system, and the whole project is sponsored by Red Hat, a company providing enterprise Linux solutions.