Fedora 18

Today, January 15, the long-awaited release of Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) took place. Initially, the release was scheduled for November, but due to problems with the Anaconda installer, it was decided to postpone the output to January.

Fedora 18 is a very important release for both the Fedora project and Red Hat, as it will be the basis for RHEL 7, which is scheduled for release in the second half of 2013.

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Major innovations

• The Anaconda installer has been completely rewritten to simplify the interface, as well as add some new features. The ability to select individual packages is excluded from netinstall, however groups of packages (for example, GNOME or X.Org Server) are saved.
• “Offline” updates when using GNOME Shell, systemd and PackageKit. Updates of key system components (kernel, glibc, xorg) will take place at the initial stage of loading in order to avoid conflicts with already running applications. This innovation will affect only users of GNOME Shell and will not affect adherents of other DE.
• For the first time, DNF is included in the main repository - an experimental package manager, which is a fork of Yum 3.4. As advantages, there is a smaller amount of code base, increased performance and lower memory consumption compared to yum.
• RPM update to version 4.10.
• Support for 256 colors in the terminal.
• Secure Boot support.
• Starting with F18, RAM will be used for storing data / tmp, which will bring improvements such as a reduced number of write / read operations (will have a positive effect on SSD life), increased performance, improved power savings and complete destruction of temporary data on reboot.
• Enable the default Avahi service.
• Inclusion of ownCloud cloud service in the system.
• Use default firewalld

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DE updates

• GNOME 3.6 is used as the main environment in Fedora 18, which includes such nice improvements as bringing GTK2 and GTK3 applications to a uniform appearance, restoring alacarte work (a menu editor that was broken with the release of GNOME 3.2 more than a year ago), A new GDM boot screen, and a significant rework of the Nautilus interface. For users dissatisfied with the latest changes in Nautilus, there is also good news - Nemo (fork nautilus 3.4) is present in the main Fedora 18 repository.
• Mate and Cinnamon are now mostly Fedora repositories. These components have already been included in the summer and are available for installation manually in Fedora 17, but from now on it will be possible to get them out of the box. For Mate, it is also planned to create a separate Spin (official LiveCD, by analogy with KDE / Xfce).
• Update KDE to version 4.9. It is also worth mentioning that KDE 4.9 is currently available in F17 as well. Fedora tries to use the latest versions of this environment in current releases, if possible. Thus, it is possible that KDE 4.10 will soon appear in the main Fedora 18 repository.
• Update Xfce to version 4.10.

Screenshots

Here we see the transferred “Applications” menu - now it opens by clicking on the square of 9 points on the left. The search bar is now centered at the top:



Updated Nautilus:



Redesigned GDM interface:



And now the screensaver window looks like:



To enter the system (or display the password entry window), you can move this screen with the mouse up or press Esc. The current desktop image is automatically picked up as a background.

Update

Upgrade to F18 using preupgrade now does not work, because The only supported update method was fedup . Fedora users 16 and below are encouraged to upgrade to F17 with preupgrade and then F18 with fedup.

Download

Torrent:
Fedora 18 Live GNOME : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live KDE : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live Xfce : i686 x86_64
Fedora 18 Live LXDE : i686 x86_64

Fedora 18 DVD : i386 x86_64

FTP:
Fedora 18 Netinstall : i386 x86_64