Fedora 18 Released, Brings with it an Overhauled Anaconda Installer

It may be a little behind schedule, but Fedora 18 is here. The Fedora team has long considered its distro to be a jack-of-all-trades – offering something for everyone, and this latest release looks to continue that. The biggest change seen here is a completely overhauled Anaconda installer. It’s cleaner, looks better, offers more concise explanations about choices a user can make – and of course, is easier to use overall. In line with this, a new upgrade tool has been released as well, creatively called FedUp (Fedora Upgrader).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Fedora 18’s live CD to boot up properly in a virtual machine, so I’m unable to comment on the upgrades made at this point. However, Anaconda is one of the classics where Linux installers are concerned, so I look forward to seeing its upgrade in the near-future.

Alonside these upgrades, Fedora 18 brings a bevvy of desktops; GNOME 3.6 (seen above), Cinnamon, MATE, KDE 4.9 and Xfce 4.10. As you’d expect, any software around the system that could be upgraded, has been upgraded, including programming languages (Perl, Rails, Python, et cetera), SAMBA (4) and the Linux kernel itself (3.6.0). Given that Linux 3.7 has been out for over a month, I’m a bit surprised to not see that here, given Fedora’s generally bleeding-edge package management – but it’s hardly something that could be considered a downside.

You can read the full release notes here, the release announcement here and download it here.