With the Alpha release date  of 28th August for Fedora 18 (codenamed Spherical Cow), approaching near, the Fedora developers were able to reach a  feature freeze today.

Having covered some of the interesting features already in previous posts when the features were still being discussed, following is the frozen list of some more upcoming goodies :

• 254 Color Terminals : Enabling Terminal screens to use extended color capabilities.
• InitialExperience : An awesome Setup, Configuration experience with a redesigned Anaconda installer called InitialExperience.
• Offline Updates : System updates in controlled environment using systemd and PackageKit.
• Secure Boot : This will enable Fedora to be installed on Microsoft Windows 8 PCs running UEFI.
• Desktop Environments : Some of the popular DEs will be supported with their latest version like Gnome 3.6, MATE (Gnome 2), KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, Xfce 4.10 and Sugar 0.98 (of OLPC fame)
• Network Team Driver : A feature which allows multiple network interfaces to act like  single one.
• Cloud platforms : Support for cloud platform applications like ownCloud, Openstack Folsom, OpenShift Origin, Eucalypus and Heat.
• Package Manager : Introduction of DNF, a new package management tool which is supposed to be leaner and faster than yum.
• Application updates : Perl 5.6, Pythion 3.3, Samba 4(currently still in Beta) and Rails 3.2 are some of the updated packages amongst other.

There are other features which might interest some of our more geeky readers. A complete list is available on the FedoraWiki.

Fedora 18 is going to be released in the first week of November and by the looks of it, it seems to be one of their best releases yet.