After a number of postponements, Fedora 13 is now due to appear on 25 May. ZDNet Australia took a pre-release of the upcoming "Goddard" distribution for a spin to see what's been cooking.
The install begins with a nice selection of options.
Before getting into the install proper, a media check produces a nostalgic blue-and-white text screen.
It's good to have a warning to remind the user that a pre-release is about to be installed.
The installation process gives you a chance to customise the software sets and repositories to be used.
Fedora 13 sticks with the boot screen from Fedora 12.
Upon booting a new installation, Fedora offers to submit a hardware profile to the Fedora Project.
GDM remains in typical Fedora blue garb.
The default Fedora desktop.
Fedora's "Add/Remove Software" utility makes controlling installed packages a breeze.
The utility even offers to start a new application you have just installed. This is a much better improvement, as it doesn't make the user search the new application in GNOME's menus.
There are times when you need to update Fedora. Hopefully you will have less than the 424 updates we had — but such is the world of beta software.
Fedora 13 comes equipped with GNOME's 2.30 release.
Rather than use F-Spot for image manipulation like other distributions, Fedora chooses the Shotwell application instead.
It wouldn't be Fedora without SELinux.
Fedora 13 comes with a new account information utility. It is a big improvement over its predecessor.
The password dialog includes a password strength meter and some nice suggestions for strong passwords.
Taking advantage of Nautilus' new view options in GNOME 2.30
NetBeans is updated to version 6.8 and still sports a Sun logo.
A new utility exclusive to Fedora 13 is the Colour Management utility. Functionality that has been present in Windows and Mac OSes for a long time.