Fedora 16 is more than two months away from final, stable release, but pre-Alpha installation ISO images have been floating around. News from the Fedora camp have already indicated that btrfs will be the default file system on Fedora 16, joining the ranks of MeeGo, the first (Linux) distribution to use btrfs as the default file system.

Imagine a machine sitting at a library, that had no operating system on it, except a livedvd. The livedvd has a disabled root account, and the only user account is xguest. The xguest account can only talk to web ports and when you logout all files and processes get destroyed.

If you are new to Ubuntu and have been using other distros like Fedora or openSUSE before, then you may find it frustrating that when you issue the "su" command it will result to authentication failure.By default, access to root account password is disabled in Ubuntu for added security measures.

Fedora has released its Asterisk-based Fedora Talk VoIP application for connecting Fedora contributors. Other news posted on a recent Fedora blog includes notes on a new automated test case management system, a SIG for ISVs, and new OpenID provider status for the Fedora Account System.

No distribution’s installer makes setting up disk encryption as easy as Anaconda, the Fedora system installer. And that has not changed in Fedora 16, the latest stable release. On previous versions of Fedora, those released before Fedora 16, the only automated disk partitioning option was one based on LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager.

The first public step towards the release of Fedora 17, code-named Beefy Miracle, was taken yesterday with the release of Fedora 17 alpha.

Fedora fans are encouraged to download, install and report bugs to the Fedora QA team. From the test installation of this alpha release that I have made, bug hunters will be very busy. I know I will be.

User management on Fedora 15 is just as easy as on any other distribution or operating system. And the graphical user management tools (there are two) are very intuitive to use. There are two types of user accounts on Fedora 15 – Standard and Administrator. The Administrator has root or super user privileges. During installation, the user created may be added to the Administrators group.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem.

Fedora 15, the latest stable release of the Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution, is the first Fedora release to have btrfs as a file system option during the installation process. On earlier versions, you would have had to pass the btrfs option to Anaconda at boot time to install Fedora on a btrfs file system.