Fedora 19 Released: Brings Improved Installer, MariaDB & Developer’s Assistant Tool

One of the best parts of any Fedora release lately is being able to utter their hilarious codenames. It all began with Fedora 17 with “Beefy Miracle”, and continued with 18, “Spherical Cow”. Fedora 19? Schrödinger’s Cat. I love it… sure beats names like Yarrow, Moonshine and Lovelock.

Of course, that’s actually the dumbest reason to greet a new Fedora release, so let’s talk about the worthwhile stuff. Fedora 19 brings along with it the Linux 3.9 kernel, GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, MATE 1.6 and Cinnamon, along with LibreOffice 4.0, GCC 4.9, RPM 4.11 and, as expected, it also replaces MySQL as the default database system with MariaDB.

Other features include a “Developer’s Assistant Tool” which delivers a set of tools to help kick-start projects quicker, a revamped setup application and improved Anaconda installer along with improved cloud support (especially for Amazon EC2).

Overall, an attractive release, and one that I’m planning to install and give a go soon. The last time I took a look at Fedora was with version 15, and I was left impressed overall. I’m hoping that will be the case once again with 19. Cheers to the developers for a great-looking release.

You can read all of what’s new with Fedora 19 here, and grab the download here.