The Fedora Project has released version 10 of its free-to-download Linux platform, adding greater support for virtualisation, a graphical boot system, and other enhancements such as network connection sharing.

Fedora development is sponsored by Red Hat, and many features that appear in it feed through into the company's Enterprise Linux distributions at a later date.

"With the release of Fedora 10, the Fedora Project continues its tradition of innovation and community. Fedora sets the standards for technical features that are relevant to everyone from desktop users to the business enterprise," said Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat.

Virtual storage management has been improved in Fedora 10, to enable the creation of guests on remote host systems. Administrators can remotely provision storage on the remote host or from a storage pool available to it, according to Red Hat.

Fedora 10 also adds a new graphical boot loader called Plymouth that substantially cuts down on boot time compared with the Red Hat graphical boot subsystem used in earlier releases. This initially works best with ATI Radeon graphics adapters, but support will be extended in future.

Wireless Connection Sharing also makes it possible for users to set up a computer to double as a wireless router, sharing its internet connection with other users via Wi-Fi. DHCP is used to assign IP addresses on the new shared Wi-Fi network, while DNS queries are forwarded transparently to upstream nameservers.

Fedora 10 also includes the latest OpenOffice.org 3.0 productivity suite and the Gnome 2.24.1 desktop shell. A new utility, SecTool also enables users to audit their systems for security issues.

Fedora 10 can be downloaded from the Fedora website here.