The Fedora Project, which develops one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions, serves essentially as a sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But that hasn’t stopped the Fedora team from pushing out a variety of new features in the latest release, Fedora 17, that should appeal more broadly than to Red Hat’s customer base alone. Here’s a look at the most important.

First, though, let’s be clear about Fedora’s relationship to RHEL. In the Fedora Project’s own words, Fedora’s the link between the two is summarized as follows:

In other words, although Fedora remains strictly independent, it’s also closely linked to Red Hat. And RHEL, in turn, depends on Fedora both as a proving ground and for helping generate enthusiasm for the Red Hat ecosystem within the Linux world as a whole.

Fedora 17: A Broad Appeal

One might expect the Fedora team, then, to focus mainly on features of importance to RHEL, which mostly targets a corporate user base. But while there’s plenty in the new version of Fedora that will excite server administrators and IT engineers, there’s also a lot for other subsets of users, including:

Lest IT administrators hoping to run Fedora on servers or in the cloud feel left out, however, there’s plenty in Fedora 17 for them as well, including the latest version of OpenStack toolkit for building and configuring cloud infrastructure and the oVirt virtualization management platform.

The extent to which Fedora’s success translates into profit for Red Hat is not completely clear, but there can be little doubt that the solid enhancements in the most recent release of Fedora won’t hurt RHEL as it vies for its piece of the operating system against both open source and proprietary competitors.