Submitted by The Fedora Project has announced the alpha release of Fedora 9. Highlights of the Fedora 9 alpha release include partition resizing support for ext2, ext3, NTFS, and encrypted filesystems in the Anaconda installer, faster and more efficient yum dependency resolver, PackageKit, FreeIPA, GNOME 2.21 development release, KDE 4.0, Firefox 3 beta 2, 2.6.24 Linux kernel, and many others.
Fedora is continuing to innovate and expand its feature set, looking at other distros it’s not hard to see why Fedora is so popular (first to market with many features)
I’m definetly looking forward to the final release of Fedora 9.
cheers
anyweb
Agreed. This will be the first Fedora in awhile that I’ll be trying out (under qemu that is). ext4 + encrypted filesystem support at install time. Very cool.
I don’t care much for the various GUI goodies, but it’s still interesting to see what they’ve done.
I wish them the best of luck, but by the time Fedora 9 goes gold these new features will be commonplace in a raft of distros. Nearly all the big distros mark time with one another’s features, give or take a few months for each one’s release schedule.
I tried Fedora 8 recently and really liked it. In part, that’s because I realized I like the “Red Hat way”. But I was disappointed by the sore lack of configuration tools and by the frankly rather sanctimonious approach taken to patent-encumbered multimedia stuff. I mean, how many people does Fedora really think are going to pass up watching their favourite movies in favor of ogg-theora or forking out money to Fluendo? And since the Fedora folks must know the answer full well, why are they asking people?
Neither would matter in the least on a server set-up or locked-down, limited desktop, I’d imagine. But for a fully loaded, day-to-day desktop, with all the multimedia gear on tap and where setting up your machine shouldn’t be too labour-intensive, Fedora didn’t strike me as the right distro to be using. I realize that Fedora has the livna repos to call on, but I’m wary of distros that depend on a single unofficial or semi-official source for a lot of stuff. If it goes west, you’ve had it.
I don’t know about many private home users? But it could matter quite much to companies (or organizations) using Fedora or Redhat on their desktops or laptops – especially in the patent wonderland USA. Fedora/Redhat is clearly targeted to such users too who may need to care for such details too.
Agreed. That’s what I like about Debian and Ubuntu. Their official repositories are very large, not much is missing from them, and the apps in the official repositories are well tested too.
Fedora has nearly 10000 packages in it’s official repository now and growing very rapidly. For completely free software, this should meet the needs of most users.
For non-free or patent encumbered software, there is rpmfusion.org coming up. You don’t have to be wary of the repository since many of the developers there are contributors to the official Fedora repository too. More on that at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/RPMFusion
There are actually several repos that contain quite a few packages for Fedora. As for the codecs, that isnt their fault and Ubuntu does it the same way I believe. You have to get them after the fact. I install one repo file after I do my installs and then all the binary proprietary packages I want are available. Not much trouble at all. Also remember that Red Hat is helping build most of the cool features that end up in “all those other distros” with Fedora. Fedora’s rough edges are the future goodies in a lot of other distro’s. Not to say that others dont help, but Fedora seems to get a bad rep for this when they are doing people a service IMHO.
Ubuntu and Fedora may worry about legalities of
codecs, but Debian and Slackware do not..
Lenny and Slack 12 (bluewhite64, vector and others
based on slackware too) play media out of the box..
Why the difference? I have never really understood this.
look where Debains origins are, http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc then look where Slacks origins are,
OK Debian is scatered all over the world..but a lot of developers seem to be from North America..so aren’t they worried about legalities?
As for Slackware..isn’t Patrick an American?(though wikipedia suggests this is unverified)
still no word on when rpmfusion will be up an running, by the sounds of what i read there having poblems with the infrastructure
Rahul
whats the chances this not being fully implemented in Fedora9? going off this doesnt seem to confident that it will be 100% implemented in F9 or the Pre-Upgrade Feature http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/fedora-marketing-list@redhat….
Pre-upgrade is about 80% done IIRC. Probably just testing is required.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PreUpgrade
Presto has been an option for the last two releases but I am not sure how likely it is to be the default. The current status is described in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePresto
Build system integration to generate delta rpm’s whenever updates are pushed is the toughest to implement now.
thanks Rahul, hope presto does make it into default but the pre-Upgrade is a feature i think Fedora has needed for a long time
I am really looking forward to the X server that starts up in one second:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OneSecondX
8 Was a very good release.
Fedora has some excellent management. If any of you guys are listening. Keep listening to the other distro folks. they have almost nothing left to complain about. every release several major things are addressed.
Keep listening to your users and your competition. Nice to see someone take customer service seriously. I think i’ll donate somehow this year weather it be time or money.
Keep up the good work