Fedora 14 release heads for the cloud

The Red Hat-backed Fedora Linux operating system has reached version 14 which marks the beginning of concurrent releases for Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

Fedora is a popular desktop Linux distribution, but release 14 integrates tools for virtualisation and cloud computing.

Fedora 14 updates the Linux kernel version to 2.6.35.

In addition to an EC2 release, an updated virt-v2v package can be used to migrate Xen virtual machines to KVM, the Kernel-based virtual machine.

Fedora 14 also debuts a “Virtualization Technology Preview” repository to allow users to test new developments in virtualization software.

On the desktop, the Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) framework has been integrated for remote desktop access.

Spice provides support for accelerated 2D graphics, encryption and cursors.

Fedora’s default desktop is GNOME, but KDE 4.5 has been packaged for the 14 release as well as a selection of software from the MeeGo project.

Fedora 14 introduces support for the D programming language. D promises the performance of C and C++ with the productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python.

The GNUstep Objective-C environment is also included.

Fedora 13 users can upgrade to 14 online and the next release, Fedora 15, is under development and scheduled for release in April 2011.