It Is Certain! Heisenbug Unleashed

Fedora 20, code-named “Heisenbug,” is available today, but don’t worry–it won’t disappear when you try to look at it. This release brings tons of new features paves the way for exciting work to come in future releases of Fedora. Let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights while you’re waiting for the download to finish. (See “How to Upgrade” below if you need a little help.) This may be the first time you can say, “I love this Heisenbug!”

New Desktop Goodness

Fedora’s stable desktop gives you the best balance of choice, usability, and up-to-date open source software. And with Heisenbug, you get the latest GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and other popular open source desktop environments so that you can choose the desktop that’s best for you. The default desktop sports the most recent GNOME release with quite a few enhancements and new applications (Maps, Music, and Software).

Fans of other desktops besides GNOME will enjoy the Fedora Spins for KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and others.

Cloud and Beyond

Fedora has been producing AMIs for Amazon Web Services (AWS) for some time as well as images that can be run in private clouds (like OpenStack), but this release marks a new focus on delivering images specifically tailored for public and private cloud environments. Check out the Fedora in the Cloud page to get started!

Building Applications and Crunching Data

Fedora 20 is a great release for developers and anyone working with data. it has new versions of Perl, Ruby on Rails, Wildfly Java Server, and Apache Hadoop. As always, Fedora is committed to bringing users the latest and greatest upstream improvements first. As a distribution for developers, it’s unbeatable.

How to Upgrade Fedora

If you’re already running Fedora 16 or later, you can easily upgrade in place using the FedUp utility.

Here’s how to make use of FedUp to get your system running Heisenbug in just a few steps. Run:

Once that’s finished, you’ll want to reboot to finish the update.

There’s a corner case to check against if you’re running Fedora 18 and a non-system version of FedUp.

Don’t forget–always back up your data before running an upgrade! Also note that if you’re using non-Fedora repositories, you may experience problems updating.

10th Anniversary of the Fedora Project

This release coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Fedora Project. Fedora 20 is an inflection point for the Fedora community. This release includes many small improvements that indicate maturing technologies that are crucial to the Fedora Project, as well as the larger Linux community.

Fedora 20 is Dedicated to Seth Vidal

The Fedora 20 release was dedicated to Seth Vidal by the Fedora Board. Seth’s contributions to Fedora, and to open source in general, were enormous. Seth’s work made Fedora a stronger project, and his conduct and leadership set a high bar for participating and collaborating within Fedora. We miss you, Seth.