The VAR Guy definitely has a eye on Ubuntu as it gains momentum across the IT landscape. But what about Red Hat? Outside of Red Hat Enterprise Linux there’s a other baby. Fedora. It’s the open source and ‘consumer’ version of Red Hat’s Linux distribution. But with Fedora 16 comes some very channel-relevant focuses. Here’s the details on the free OS…

Red Hat has made Fedora 16 to be compatible with some new and upcoming open source virtualization and “cloud goodies galore” like:

This doesn’t mean you can go out and replace your aging RHEL distro with Fedora 16, but it does mean that SMBs or other small home offices have a free and easy opportunity to start taking advantage of more advanced virtualization and cloud technologies that are on the IT scene. Like most Linux projects, there’s a wiki for it, and The Fedora Project has a massive list of updates that are inside Fedora 16.

And unlike Ubuntu, which is shifting gears to the Unity GUI, Fedora 16 continues to support the latest and greatest versions of both Gnome (3.2) and KDE (4.7). If you’re interested, run it virtualized or on your desktop computer by grabbing the download here.