Mauriat Miranda     mjmwired

Fedora 9 Released

Can you feel the burn of “Sulphur” ?

After an unfortunate 2 week delay the Fedora project just announced the release of Fedora 9. Fedora has always been known to be the latest and greatest and this release is no different, rough edges and all. A great deal of hard work has been done to put this all together.

The highlights from the Release Summary:

Desktop

  • GNOME 2.22 - many added functions, improvements
  • KDE 4.0.3 - the highly anticipated KDE4!
  • XFCE 4.4.2 - now in it’s own LiveSpin as well, just like KDE and GNOME
  • Online Desktop - providing a desktop experience designed around online services

Administration/Hardware/System

  • Network Manager - major improvements for wireless network management, mobile broadband, GSM, CDMA as well as Ad-Hoc networking
  • Bluetooth - devices and tools now have better graphical and system integration
  • Laptops - users benefit from the “quirks” feature in HAL, including better suspend/resume and multimedia keyboard support
  • PackageKit - An easy to use tool for updating.
  • YUM - performance improvements.
  • Xorg 7.4/X Server 1.5 (almost) - Major updates to X including faster startup and shutdown (unfortunately not quite complete but should be updated soon)
  • Upstart - Originally from Ubuntu, this will eventually replace the old init system leading to faster bootup time

Graphics/Multimedia

  • GNOME Cheese - a webcam photo and video creation utility
  • PulseAudio - updated and now default

Java

  • OpenJDK - A switch from IcedTea. Closer alignment with Sun Open Source Java

SoftwareUpdates

  • Firefox 3.0 (almost) - Not quite complete but massive improvements over Firefox 2
  • Eclipse 3.3.1
  • Perl 5.10 - many improvements
  • OpenOffice 2.4 - many new features
  • Kernel 2.6.25

Installer (Anaconda)

  • More flexibility in installation
  • Partition Resizing - A very welcome option to allow resizing EXT2/EXT3/NTFS partitions before installation (esp when dual booting with that other OS)
  • Rescue Mode - improved now with FirstAidKit

You can download Fedora 9 using the standard mirrors or using the Torrent (recommended).

Please user the Fedora-List mailing list or any of the forums for help. I have published my Personal Fedora 9 Installation Guide which should provide people with some hints for people eager to try it out. Lots more to do!

Fedora 9 as I have examined for a few weeks now is definitely far more polished than the past releases. I am sure people will like it! A more thorough examination to follow. Till then …

… I hope you like the smell of Sulphur.

Posted in: Distributions, F9, Fedora,

1 Comments:

  • Indo on May 18, 2008 - 01:13 PM

    Just read your Fedora 9 install guide. Awesome as always…. It makes Fedora 9 complete and fully usable.