Red Hat delivers Fedora 15 'Lovelock' beta

The Fedora 15 operating system, codenamed Lovelock, is now available to download in beta form, Red Hat announced on Tuesday.

The Linux-based operating system brings Gnome 3, which has been visually overhauled as well as providing changes below the surface, Red Hat said.

The Lovelock release aims to replace the SysVinit and Upstart system and session managers with 'Systemd', which the company says will speed up boot times in the long run.

Additionally, the release brings a previously unavailable dynamic firewall management option, allowing users to make changes to settings without the need to reboot the firewall.

It will also include LibreOffice, a community-led fork of OpenOffice, as its default office package. The beta is described as relatively stable by Red Hat but the company warns there may be bugs.

A new version of Fedora is released approximately every six months. The full release of Lovelock is scheduled for "late spring", Red Hat said.

Ubuntu 11.04, released on Wednesday, had intended to use Gnome 3 for its desktop interface but instead opted to use Unity as its default user interface following delays in the release of Gnome 3.