The beta version of Fedora 9 has been released. It comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.2, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, PackageKit, Kernel 2.6.25-rc5, and much more. “The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community’s help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora’s development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve usability, performance, and stability.”
Shouldn’t it be Firefox 3 Beta 4 instead of 5 ?
Fedora is tracking the development snapshot on a daily basis that is closer to beta 5 actually.
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
Too bad Openoffice 3.0 won’t be ready for Fedora 9. Well, there is something to expect from Fedora 10.
I think it’s cool that just a couple of years ago Fedora was just starting out after the discontinuation of Red Hat 9 and now is itself up to its own version 9. As an end user I think this is one distribution that works well and looks good!
I agree with you that it works well and performs well. I am hoping that the rough edges of pulseaudio and the audio applications will be smoother with this release. I am using Fedora 8 on an old Athlon 1 Gig Hz chip and it works well. I have a dual boot of Windows XP on the same box and I only logged into it this year to pay the taxes with Turbo Tax since it has issues with Wine still.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed this yet but Firefox 3 picks up the GTK theme correctly so the icons are real Gnome icons and not approximated skins. Nice touch thanks to the Mozilla folks working on the Linux build.
Edited 2008-03-25 23:23 UTC
buff: as many distros are now using PulseAudio and we’ve all been testing it and contributing patches, it should be a lot smoother in all upcoming distros (F9, Mandriva 2008 Spring, Ubuntu 8.04 etc) than it was in F8.
That is good to know people are polishing pulseaudio. I like the idea but it annoys me when it dies for unknown reasons and it often times makes a lot of static noise when volume goes to zero between songs. It also has conflicts with the Flash plugin too. I get more crashes now using Flash under pulseaudio. I sent Adobe a bug report.
In Fedora, you might want to try to update to the 0.9.8 which is rawhide currently that fixes a number of issues. For the flash plugin issue, make sure you follow
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Desktop.htm…
any reason why there not using 0.9.9 PulseAudio?
Fedora 8 had a TON of stuff to play with. This one has a couple but still more system improvements like xstartup being faster, ext4, encryp. things i dont really get to “play” with but welcome additions just the same.
Love this distro for tinkering daily.
Take a closer look. Fedora 9 integrates quite a lot of new features. You left a number of them:
Things where Red Hat developers are leading include:
* PackageKit – http://packagekit.org – A cross distribution front end for managing software.
* FreeIPA – http://freeipa.org/page/Main_Page. A turn key replacement for Active Directory
* A number of GNOME improvements including GVFS. Fedora 8 already had PolicyKit support that has improved with this release.
* NetworkManager 0.7 with a hell lot of new features and system wide static and wireless network management.
* Live CD persistence support
* Pre Upgrade – A live upgrade solution
* Xen Part virt_ops –
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvops
Other than that, there is:
LTSP 5 integration. Probably will include a targeted spin for this.
KDE 4.0.x – Major new revision. A separate KDE spin as before.
Xfce 4.4.2 – Separate spin as part of the release this time.
Firefox 3.0
OpenJDK 6.0
Swfdec, a flash browser plugin
Even more is listed at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList
>Swfdec, a flash browser plugin
Until now i have always used gnash. Are there any rationale behind the decision to choose swfdec over gnash?
I can not think of any other legitimate use for Flash other than watching YouTube videos. LGPL-licensed, and works on FreeBSD and Linux.
Swfdec uses gstreamer which allows you to install additional plugins easily. It is also provides hooks to make this easier for the end user.
“Until now i have always used gnash. Are there any rationale behind the decision to choose swfdec over gnash?”
1. swfdec is now included in GNOME (specifically swfdec-gnome).
2. GStreamer-based (though I believe Gnash is also)
3. It has hooks to install missing codecs (via Codeina or Ubuntu’s codec installer), which Gnash currently doesn’t.
Just played with FC9 beta today. The Gnome part seems to run very nice. But KDE 4.02 is not workable with me. If plasma crashes, kde refuses to start …. But I doubt I can blame that on Fedora. I really hope at least KDE 4.03 will be in updates when FC9 final is being released.
New GDM im not to keen on but in time im sure i’ll get used to it,