The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 17, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora operating system is free of cost to download and includes free and open source software for users to enjoy and share. Developed by a worldwide community, the Fedora Project collaborates closely with upstream free software project teams to provide a compelling experience for users and to access and integrate improvements and innovation rapidly.

"I am extremely proud of the Fedora 17 release. The addition of projects such as oVirt and JBoss Application Server 7, enhancements in OpenStack, and continued support for fresh releases of desktop environments demonstrate the Fedora Project's commitment to deliver rich features and capabilities," said Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Project Leader. "This, combined with our leading-edge innovations at the operating-system level, truly makes Fedora 17 a comprehensive and robust operating system for all types of users."

An abundance of feature enhancements in Fedora 17 include:

• Desktop Features: GNOME 3.4 introduces many user experience improvements, including new search capabilities in the Activities Overview, improved themes, and enhancements to the Documents and Contacts application; and GIMP 2.8, the newest version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), brings improvements such as single-window mode, layer groups, and on-canvas text editing.
• Cloud, Virtualization, and Performance Features: OpenStack, a collection of services that can be used to set up and run cloud compute and storage infrastructure, is updated to the latest release, 2012.1 (Essex); oVirt, an open virtualization platform, provides a feature-rich virtualization management system with robust capabilities for both hosts and guests; and the Cluster stack includes numerous and significant updates for both high availability and load balancing applications.
• Developer Features: JBoss Application Server 7 is a fast, lightweight Java EE-based application server, optimized for developing and launching Java EE applications; a pre-release of Juno, the release of the Eclipse SDK expected later this year; Java 7 (and OpenJDK7) is the default Java runtime and Java build toolset.

The Fedora Project aims to release a new version of its free operating system approximately every six months. This rapid development cycle encourages collaboration and the inclusion of the latest, most cutting-edge open source features available. Fedora is built by community members from across the globe, and the Fedora Project's transparent and open collaboration process has attracted thousands of registered contributors. The total of unique IPs across Fedora releases since tracking was initiated at Fedora 7 is now approaching 38 million connections. Information about Fedora's statistics and collection methodology is open and transparent to the public on the following wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics .

The Fedora Project has also held multiple Fedora User and Developer Conferences (FUDCon) around the world during the past year including events in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Pune, India; and Milan, Italy. Upcoming FUDCons are planned for August 23 - 25, 2012 in Valencia, Venezuela; October 13 -- 15 in Paris, France; and January 18 -- 20, 2013 in Lawrence, Kansas, USA.

For more information on Fedora 17 and to download the distribution or to join this community effort, please visit www.fedoraproject.org .