Fedora Core Archive

A week ago, the Fedora Project released Fedora 9 into the world. Fedora 9 comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.2.2, PackageKit, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, a 2.6.25-based Linux kernel, and much more. As always, the intertubes have been flooded with reviews, so we figured we would summarise a few of them.

The Fedora Project has pushed out its 9th release. The release announcement is one of those fancy story ones, without much actual information, but an earlier email by Fedora project leader Paul Frields had some more interesting things to say.

"It's been almost two months since Fedora 9 Alpha was released, which we subsequently previewed. Now with the release of Fedora 9 just being 35 days out, Red Hat has pushed out the beta release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) with many more features implemented and ready to be tested. We have taken the time to explore the features of Fedora 9 and the progress that has been made."

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."

"One major feature present in Fedora 9 will be the ext4 implementation. The new filesystem will not be the default for the distribution, but will be available for users and systems administrators to enable. New functionality includes larger capacities and online defragmentation, for better performance and more reliability. To find out more, we talked with Eric Sandeen, Fedora project member and filesystem developer at Red Hat."

"Paul Frields is new to Red Hat, but he's not new to the Fedora Linux community. Frields became the Fedora project leader and a Red Hat employee at the beginning of February. Previously Frields was a US government employee and a contributor to the Fedora community for more than four years. Frields takes over at a pivotal time for Fedora as it gears up for its next major release, Fedora 9. A feature freeze is currently set for March 4, and Frields is already ready to chat about where Fedora is heading."

"KDE 4 is seen by many to be the next big step on the free software desktop, while others think releasing 4.0 in its current condition was misleading and a mistake. Either way, it's an innovative release and inline with Fedora's goal of providing the latest and greatest free software it is set to be the default KDE environment in the next major release of Fedora. We caught up with two members of the KDE SIG to talk about the work they're doing to get it ready for release, their own opinions on the software and what they think about the progress made by Fedora in getting over its GNOME centric reputation."

The Fedora 8 Xfce Spin has been released. "Fedora Xfce Spin is a bootable Fedora Live CD image available for x86 and x86_64 architecture. It can be optionally installed to hard disk or converted into boot USB images and is ideal for Xfce fans and for users running Fedora on relatively low resource systems. As a additional bonus, this release rolls in updates for Fedora 8 released till yesterday (2008/02/12)."

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.

"Anyone who has installed Linux on Virtual PC/Virtual Server knows that while yes, Linux is supported on these platforms, and yes, it does run well after getting it setup - installation can be a downright pain. It is for this reason that I take great pride in the fact that installing Linux on the Hyper-V beta release is a breeze."

"We all appreciate that when we turn on our Linux systems they're pretty secure. Thanks to continuing improvements to SELinux, it is increasingly easy for users to take advantage of this powerful security tool. Read on to find an interview with Daniel Walsh, the principal developer of SELinux in Fedora from Red Hat, where he tells us more about what SELinux does and how it's improved in Fedora 8. At the end of the article are some screenshots which show-off the new policy creation GUI."

The Fedora Project builds a world-class Linux operating system, consisting of entirely free (meaning both zero-cost and full source code available) software, that is used by companies, organizations and individuals worldwide, says Cio.com.

Fedora 8 has been released. It sports a new look and feel, a codec installation program, the first signs of the GNOME online desktop, various security improvements, support for Compiz and Compiz-Fusion, Java support via Iced-Tea, and much more. Get it from the download page. Update: A couple of articles about the release: 1, 2, 3. Update II: One more: 4.

Fedora 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released. "Fedora 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released on the torrent site. Both DVD and Live images have been provided. Unless something goes terribly wrong, these will be the same bits (modulo gpg signed SHA1SUM files) that will go to the mirrors for the final Fedora 8 release." Update: There is an interview up about CodecBuddy's inclusion in Fedora 8 with the two developers behind this feature.