On Monday, Red Hat released the latest version of Fedora, Fedora Core 4. Fedora is a free version of Linux that Red Hat is using to advance virtualization, programming tools and other software at the frontier of open-source development.
One new feature in Fedora Core 4 is Xen virtualization software, which allows multiple operating systems run on the same computer. Xen competes with software from EMC"s VMware and with Microsoft"s virtual machine products, however, the difference is, Xen is free. Additionally, the new Fedora was built using the new version 4 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC 4 brings a new framework that its advocates hope will lead to better performance.