Note: Download the Fedora 15 cheat sheet from here.

After months of development, Fedora 15, codenamed "Lovelock" has finally been released today. In keeping up with Fedora's love for the latest software, Fedora 15, too, has a lot of amazing new features. In this article, we will look at some of the new features and then proceed to the download links.

Fedora 15 - What's New?

Fedora 15 "Lovelock" has a number of new bleeding-edge features. Here are some of the most interesting ones.

Dynamic Firewall

Fedora 15 now has support for dynamic firewall with firewalld. Firewalld allows the firewall in Fedora 15 to be dynamically managed without the need to restart the whole firewall.

This feature could come handy for maintaining persistent connections. It can also be useful for applications like printer discovery where a program has to broadcast a message and the reply has to come from an unknown address.

You can read more about the dynamic firewall in Fedora 15 here.

GNOME 3

This is biggest change that normal users will notice about Fedora 15. Fedora 15 "Lovelock" is using the GNOME 3 stack with GNOME Shell. (Unlike Ubuntu 11.10, which will use GNOME 3 but not GNOME Shell.)

There is not much to be said about GNOME 3 but for users it will be a radical shift in the way they interact with their computer. It will be interesting to see if the Fedora 15 users accept the GNOME Shell or go to other desktop environments, like a lot of Ubuntu users did after Unity.

For the users who do not use GNOME, Fedora 15 also has KDE 4.6 and Xfce 4.8.

LibreOffice

Like many other Linux distributions, Fedora 15 has dropped OpenOffice.org and have gone for LibreOffice. There is not much difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice right now. So users should feel no discomfort moving over to LibreOffice.

Improved Power Management

PowerTOP is a tool for finding the software component that makes the system consume more power than necessary when the system in idle.

Fedora 15 includes PowerTOP 2.x which is a complete rewrite of PowerTOP 1.x. PowerTOP 2.x has been developed to give more accurate data and better power estimation.

You can read more about it here.

Consistent Device Naming Scheme

Fedora 15 has done away with the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices and has adopted a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming.

You can read more about it here.

systemd

Systemd is a new system initialization and session management daemon for Linux. It was initially planned for inclusion in Fedora 14 but deferred to Fedora 15 because of time constrains.

You can read more about systemd in Fedora 15 here. On a somewhat related note, systemd is also being proposed for inclusion in GNOME 3.2.

Rupee Symbol

Fedora users from India will also be happy to note that the Rupee symbol has been added in Fedora 15 "Lovelock".

These are just some of the features in Fedora 15, for the complete feature list refer here.

Download Fedora 15 "Lovelock"

Torrents for Fedora 15 are already active. To download Fedora 15, go to this page and download the appropriate torrent file. Using a torrent client, download Fedora 15.

You can also download from here. But it could be slow right now.