From the 'Roman Emperors of Sparta' files:

Red Hat's Fedora Linux community has now voted in a name for the upcoming Fedora 12 release. Constantine beat out four other rivals names including: Chilon, Orville, Rugosa and Umbria.

Fedora 12 succeeds Fedora 11's Leonidas (a Spartan King) with the name of a famous Roman Emperor. It's actually an interesting metaphor if you follow it through. Leonidas fought off the invaders with 300 men in a valiant stand. Constantine on the other hand is the Emperor that brought the Christian religion to the Roman Empire. As metaphor does that mean that Fedora 12 will bring the Linux religion to the masses?

In any event, Fedora 12 is still in very early development. The current release schedule pegs the release date at November 3rd 2009.

By that point Fedora 12 (for the desktop) will be up against Windows 7 (no cute codename there) and Ubuntu's Karmic Koala. I've blogged before how the different Linux distribution all have very different code names.

Ubuntu has its 'cute' animal names, openSUSE has its German philosophers, Debian is still stuck on Toy Story and Fedora seems to be fixated now on Kings and Emperors of antiquity.

*UPDATE 06/30 - Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields sent in a comment to clarify the connection between the Fedora release names - "Actually, the connection between Fedora 11 "Leonidas" and Fedora 12 "Constantine" is that both names are townships within St. Joseph County, Michigan."