Fedora 9 dazzles with its shiny newness

It's IT Blogwatch: in which we take a headgear-flavored gander at Fedora 9. Not to mention why we hate smug, self-satisfied Apple Macintosh users...

Todd R. Weiss reports:

Users of Red Hat Inc.'s Fedora who wanted an easier way to use the popular and free community-supported Linux operating system on portable USB drives have had their wishes granted. The improved USB drive capabilities are one of the biggest new features of the latest Fedora 9 release, which was announced today. The USB drive capabilities mean that Fedora 9 Live images can be added to a USB key under a Linux or Windows application with no loss of data ... comes six months after the release of Fedora 8 last November ... Red Hat touts Fedora as the ongoing, free version of its Linux operating system, for use by anyone, including consumers, hobbyists and open-source fans. Last month, Red Hat said that because it continues to expand the Fedora Project, it has no plans to release a retail version of its Linux operating system specifically for consumers. more

Red Hat's Fedora? Mike McGrath clarifies:

As someone thats been working with it for months already I’m quite pleased with this release. For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Fedora Project it’s a Red Hat sponsored community project. It has its own board (which in the next month or so will consist of 5 elected seats and 4 Red Hat appointed seats… Red Hat no longer has majority control.) Most of its contributors are volunteers (roughly 2/3’s are non Red Hat). And most importantly, the Fedora Project’s flagship product is Fedora the operating system ... Every time I write one of these things someone says “no thanks, I’ll stick with Debian” or some other distro ... I’ll remind you that what is in Fedora now will be in the next release of $YOUR_DISTRO, with the live media why not take a look? more

Ryan Paul makes the obvious pun:

I tip my hat to the global community of open source software developers behind the popular Fedora Linux distribution ... Fedora 9 delivers a cutting edge desktop stack ... includes GNOME 2.22, which has some significant improvements like the GVFS virtual filesystem abstraction layer. This is also the first version of Fedora to offer KDE 4, a long-awaited overhaul of the KDE environment ... Important architectural features—such as the PulseAudio sound server and the PolicyKit secure privilege escalation system—that were first included in Fedora 8 are now integrated in a more complete and pervasive way. The NetworkManager tool, which simplifies network configuration and provides easy access to wireless networks, also gets some nice feature improvements in this release, like support for connecting with GSM and CDMA devices. more

KDE's Kevin Kofler kongratulates:

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 9, codenamed "Sulphur". As your periodic table will tell you, Sulphur is the element below Oxygen, a fitting release name for the third major distribution to ship KDE 4.0 (congrats to Mandriva and Kubuntu for getting there first) and the first to make it the only version of the desktop ... To support your existing KDE 3 applications such as Kontact, Amarok and K3b, Fedora 9 includes compatibility libraries from KDE 3.5.9 ... also comes with other major new features, such as the switch to Upstart to handle system startup, an improved NetworkManager including support for mobile broadband and systemwide configuration, a new, fast version of X.Org X11, TexLive replacing tetex, unified spellchecking dictionaries and much more. If that was not enough to convince you, you can have a look at some screenshots showing KDE 4 on Fedora 9. more

Binny Abraham wishes Indian broadband was faster:

I have been using Fedora since Fedora Core 3. And I will be upgrading to the latest release as soon as I get my hands on it. I have started the download - but I have a 256kbps internet connection - and it will take around 4 days for the download to complete. After the install, I will write a review on it. I can’t wait to see the new KDE! I have began a process of backing up my data so that nothing will be lost during the upgrade. No matter how careful I am, I always manage to loose something in the upgrade. Yeah, I know - Murphy’s Law. I hate Murphy. I am waiting to see what I loose this time. Last time it was my database. Luckily I was able to restore it from my backup - but the data entered after the backup was lost. more

Rock me, Falko Timme:

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 9 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP5 and Ruby, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 9, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well ... In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). more

Basil Mohamed Gohar says it's "Awesome":

Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9’s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community ... Unified Dictionary Support ... Ext4 Filesystem Support ... Gvfs ... jigdo ... KDE4 ... PackageKit ... 100% Free and Open Source ... Alhamdulillaah! more

And finally...

• Why we hate smug, self-satisfied Apple Macintosh users [but amazingly catchy soundtrack from The Bird And The Bee]
  

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