Fedora 14 released with new features for developers

The Fedora development community announced on Tuesday the official release of Fedora 14, codenamed Laughlin. The new version is a bit light on user-facing changes, but adds some useful features for developers. Fedora typically issues a new release every six months and is loosely aligned with the GNOME development cycle. Each release brings updated software and some new packages.
Fedora 14 ships with GNOME 2.32, a transitional GNOME release that introduces some important architectural changes under the hood in preparation for GNOME 3. There aren't many new GNOME features on the surface, however, because the GNOME developers are largely focused on preparing a new shell that will significantly overhaul the next version of the desktop. KDE 4.5, which was released in August, is also available in Fedora 14. It has a new notification system and preliminary support for tiling in the KWin window manager.
Programming tools got a major boost in Fedora 14. An LLVM-based compiler for the D programming language and an associated runtime library were added to the package repositories. There are also new packages for Rakudo, an implementation of Perl 6. Fedora's excellent support for Python continues to shine in version 14, which includes Python 2.7 out of the box as the standard Python version. Python 3, which was introduced in Fedora 13 earlier this year, can be installed in parallel from the repositories.
Fedora 14 also has some nice development tool improvements. It includes Netbeans 6.9 and the latest version of Eclipse, which was released in June. The Gdb debugger got some performance improvements and a new feature for analyzing memory usage.
Due to Red Hat's significant investments in virtualization technology and ongoing stewardship of kvm, Fedora often serves as a testbed for the latest virtualization technologies. Fedora 14 includes Spice, which enables more seamless interaction with virtualized desktops. It can be used to connect to remote or local QEMU virtual machine instances and is designed to handle 2D graphics acceleration, audio support, and video streaming. The developers recommend using a 64-bit software environment on the host, but the client can be either x86 or x86-64.
I tested Fedora 14 on my Dell Mini 10 netbook. It worked as expected and didn't pose any unanticipated challenges.
Users can download the Fedora 14 installable Live CD image from the project's website. A number of other variants are also available, including a KDE-based Live CD and a full DVD installer. For more details, you can refer to the official Fedora 14 release notes.