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A Few Of Fedora 12's Coming Features

Fedora 12's public beta is now out -- what timing, right? -- and while a cursory glance at the feature list as a whole doesn't sport anything revolutionary, there's more than a few goodies worth singling out.

Right at the top of the list is the one tool I hope I don't have to use, but which I'm glad is included: Abrt 1.0, Fedora's bug reporting tool -- the instructions for which include a way to simulate a crash for the sake of testing to see if it works. Thing is, Abrt nominally only fires when a program crashes -- it's not for submitting feature requests or reports about "paper cuts", something Ubuntu started doing which I hope gains wider acceptance amongst Linux distros in general.

Fedora Studio takes the wealth of multimedia applications available in Fedora and organizes them in a logical way. A good idea, since one of the most common complaints I've heard about applications on Linux generally is that their functions aren't intuitively described, and their naming conventions often fail them in this regard, too. (GIMP? xsane? Your guess would be as good as mine as to what those do at first glance.)

While I don't use a mobile broadband connection (yet), the list of mobile broadband enhancements is heartening -- signal strength monitoring, multi-network scanning, and a database of possible network providers for easy setup. Mobile users should also be aware that Fedora's adding support for Moblin Core -- a way to make Fedora useful on small-display devices without having to create goofy theme hacks or other workarounds.

I'll be writing in detail about my experiences with F12 beta in the days to come.

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