The Fedora Project has released a beta version of Fedora 13, the next major release for the popular open source Linux distribution. Fedora 13, nicknamed "Goddard," is shaping up to be a worthy upgrade, but lacks some of the flashy new features found in competitors like Ubuntu. Back when Fedora 12 was released, Fedora project leader Paul Frields told The Register that Fedora is intended, "first and foremost for users interested in and capable of contributing to open source." That focus on tech savvy users is reflected in the Fedora 13 beta release, which offers a number of new features, but most of them are under-the-hood improvements, which stands in stark contrast to the recently released Ubuntu beta. Where Ubuntu was full of new features designed to entice the everyday user -- social network apps installed by default, the new U1 music store and more -- Fedora 13 is a much more stoic, though still very welcome, update. Among the impressive under-the-hood features is the new, experimental open source 3D acceleration support for Nvidia graphics cards. Fedora 12, the current stable release of the Fedora line, started the 3D support with some open source drivers for newer ATI graphics cards, and Fedora 13 will see that support extended to cover NVidia video cards thanks to the Nouveau drivers. Of course Fedora has never stopped you from using closed, proprietary drivers, but this is the first time that an open source solution has been available on the platform. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, you'll need to install the drivers yourself. The package in question is mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. If you're testing the beta, and have an NVidia card in your PC, be sure to give Fedora your feedback and file any bugs you encounter. Other new features in Fedora 13 include automatic printer driver installation -- which means if you plugin a supported printer the driver is downloaded and installed automatically. It's not the most exciting feature we've seen, but it does add another, it-just-works element to the already very user-friendly distro. Among the other upgrade components are some NetworkManager improvements, including a new command line interface and a fairly major redesign of the user management interface. Fedora's Anaconda installer has also been reworked again, offering what Fedora's release notes call, "a simpler workflow for desktop and laptop users." Essentially there are few options to decipher during the installation process, though most of the old fine-tuning menus are still available to advanced users that want to access them. Interestingly, on systems with more than 50 GB of free space, Anaconda defaults to creating /home on its own partition. We've not sure why Anaconda only does it when 50 GB is available, but keeping /home separate from the system is fairly common practice and you can of course still customize your disk partitioning by hand during the installation process. Fedora 13 also sees a number of upgrades to common software packages -- Gnome 3.2 is the default desktop, OpenOffice 3.2 is included and the Empathy chat framework has been updated. Firefox has also been upgraded to the new Firefox 3.6 with support for HTML5 video, provided the video is encoded using the Ogg Theora video codec. Fedora was among the first to ship the new Theora 1.1, a much-improved version of the open video codec which features video quality on par with proprietary solutions like H.264. The Theora 1.1 project is a combined effort between the Xiph.Org Foundation, Mozilla and Fedora developers. Anyone doing graphics work on Fedora will like the new color management system for the GNOME desktop. There's even support for vendor-supplied ICC or ICM profile files -- just double-click them to config. Python programmers will be happy to know that Fedora 13 comes with a "parallel-installable" Python 3 environment that will make it easy for those looking to upgrade their code to test in both Python 2.6 and 3.0, without the need to install Python 3.0 from scratch. The KDE varient of Fedora has been upgraded to KDE 4.4, which offers better Pulse Audio integration. Overall Fedora 13 already looks like it will be a worthy upgrade to the Fedora line. While it may lack some of the more "everyday user" features of Ubuntu 10.04, Fedora is still a very user-friendly distro and for many Fedora 13 will be worth the upgrade for the NVidia support alone. If you'd like to test out this beta release, head to the Fedora 13 downloads page and grab a copy today.