Fedora 10 is out and about.

Fedora of course is Red Hat's freebie community OS and testbed for coming attractions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The new rev is supposed to have substantial virtualization improvements for remotely installing and managing storage provisioning and includes NetworkManager connection sharing so laptop users with Ethernet or mobile broadband connections can collaborate anywhere, anytime.

The release debuts a new graphical boot system called Plymouth, designed to speed up the boot process by taking advantage of a new kernel mode-setting feature.

Plymouth was designed by Fedora contributors and is targeted primarily at ATI cards, but will be expanded at some point to support a broader range of media cards.

It also adds hardware support for webcams and better handling of printers via both direct physical connections and networks.

And PackageKit, a software management tool that originally debuted in Fedora 9, has been extended in this release to provide on-demand codec software installation.

Fedora 10 also has a new security auditing and detection toolkit called SecTool, and a brand new set of Python bindings that lets programmers use the FIPS-140-validated NSS library to develop secure applications.

The distribution extends the Live USB persistence feature pioneered in Fedora 9, adding support for a separate user data area with optional encryption for what Red Hat calls "the ultimate experience" in secure portable computing.

Fedora 10 also includes the new OpenOffice 3.0 and Gnome 2.24.1 desktop; a rewritten audio system for faster response and lower power usage; a full set of appliance building tools; and supposedly "support for more hardware than any other operating system."