Fedora 16 is more than two months away from final, stable release, but pre-Alpha installation ISO images have been floating around. News from the Fedora camp have already indicated that btrfs will be the default file system on Fedora 16, joining the ranks of MeeGo, the first (Linux) distribution to use btrfs as the default file system.

Btrfs was supposed to have been the default file system for Fedora 16, but for technical reasons, that did not happen. Word on the street says it will be, in Fedora 17. But you do not have to wait for Fedora 17 to get your system humming on btrfs because you can do it right now.

Fedora 15, the latest stable release of the Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution, is the first Fedora release to have btrfs as a file system option during the installation process. On earlier versions, you would have had to pass the btrfs option to Anaconda at boot time to install Fedora on a btrfs file system.

Btrfs, the B-tree File System, is almost at the stage when it will become the default file system on the major Linux distributions. It is already the default on MeeGo, and will, by the next two releases or so, be the default on Fedora.

Like Fedora 13, Fedora 14, the latest version of Fedora, has support for btrfs. However, it is not enabled out of the box, that is, it is not available as a File System Type option, if you did not edit the boot method to include btrfs. This post offers a very simple guide on how to pass the btrfs option to Fedora 14.

One of the benefits of Btrfs besides offering competitive performance against other Linux file-systems and SSD optimizations is its support for sub-volumes and writable snapshots. While Btrfs is still in development and is not yet used as a default file-system by any Linux distribution, Red Hat has been introducing support for system rollbacks into Fedora.

Like many recent Linux releases, Mageia's installer supports btrfs, a copy-on-write file system with built-in support for subvolumes, filesystem-based RAID 0/1/10, online resizing, etc.

It is still under development, and not yet recommended for use in a production, but it is already the default file system on MeeGo, and is slated to be the default on Fedora 16.

The next release of the Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux distribution is going to be Fedora 13, which is due out in 2010 and already promises many new features like Btrfs file-system rollbacks and NFSv4.

The Fedora Project Team announced yesterday, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1.