Jesse Keating has announced the availability of the first alpha release of Fedora 13: “The Fedora 13 ‘Goddard’ alpha release is available. Among the top features for end users, we have: automatic print driver installation so when you plug in a USB printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it if needed; automatic installation of language packs; redesigned user management interface; color management to better set and control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners; NetworkManager improvements include CLI; experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards.” See the release announcement and release notes for further details. Download (torrents): F13-Alpha-i686-Live.iso (835MB, SHA256, torrent), F13-Alpha-i686-Live-KDE.iso (714MB, SHA256, torrent), F13-Alpha-x86_64-Live.iso (842MB, SHA256, torrent), F13-Alpha-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso (705MB, SHA256, torrent).

Features in Fedora 13 Alpha

Among the top features for end users, we have:

  • Automatic print driver installation. We’re using RPM and PackageKit for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a USB printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it if needed.
  • Automatic installation of language packs. Yum language packs plugin support makes software installation smarter and easier for everyone worldwide, by automatically downloading language support for large suites of Fedora software when the user’s environment requires it.
  • Redesigned user management interface. The user account tool has been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options for your Fedora system.
  • Color management. Color Management allows you to better set and control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through the gnome-color-manager package.
  • NetworkManager improvements include CLI. NetworkManager is now a one stop shop for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up, broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. And now it can all be done in the command line, if you’re into that sort of thing.
  • Experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. In this release we are one step closer to having 3D supported on completely free and open source software (FOSS) drivers. In Fedora 12 we got a lot of ATI chips working, and this time we’ve added a wide range of NVidia cards. You can install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package to try out the work in progress.