The Fedora developers have been hard at work, and the result is the first alpha release of Fedora 12 which was announced earlier today.

Codenamed “Constantine”, the Fedora 12 Alpha includes a number of new features and improvements over Fedora 11. Among these are:

• Better webcam support which includes out-of-the box support for many new webcams;
• Empathy as the default IM client in place of Pidgin;
• Gnome 2.27.90 beta and KDE 4.3, the latest versions of those desktops;
• Network Manager Mobile Broadband which includes a database of known mobile broadband providers to simplify setting up a mobile broadband connection;
• A better free video codec in the latest version of the Ogg Theora video encoder, codenamed “Thusnelda”;
• PackageKit improvements that include plugins for browser-based or command line installs;
• PulseAudio improvements to include profiles, input switching and easier speaker setup; and
• Better power management.

Also included in Fedora 12 is better IPv6 network management, and automatic bug-reporting tool, Bluetooth on demand, as well as KVM virtualisation improvements that reduce memory consumption, NIC hotplug, better disk I/O, modern PXE booting, support for flexible network configurations, and much more.

A fuller list of features in Fedora 12 can be found on the Fedora Wiki.

For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to
report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the
release notes:

The beta release of Fedora 12 is planned for 13 October and the final release for 10 November.