Fedora 9

For me, this is a somewhat special release, since this is the first release, I'm really involved in as a Fedora contributor. I have been a Fedora & Red Hat user for some time... it all started with a Red Hat Professional Workstation (after some tries with Debian and Knoppix - we all had Knoppix somewhen, right?). Some people also considered me as a distribution-junkie, since I tried out several distributions... but in the end, I returned to Fedora. Well, during my work practice, I got to know some new people and I was finally encouraged to start to do something - thank you Thorsten for all this :).

Currently, I'm mainly focussed on education in Fedora (you may notice some posts concerning this topic now and then here), but for example also interested in the creation of various spins - that's why I'm a member of the Education and the Spins SIG, as well as an ambassador and part of the marketing group (but I'll talk about my Fedora work later)...

But back to Fedora 9: This release brings along several new features, including innovations like the PackageKit package management system, as well as the new KDE 4 desktop environment and a beta of Firefox 3. For GNOME users, it might be interesting to notice the inclusion of the 2.22 release. On the other hand, the former open source Java version IcedTea (which belongs to Java's 1.7.0 unstable part) has been replaced by OpenJDK, which contains version 1.6.0.

Those desktop improvements stand beside with major system changes, including updates for Red Hat's installer called Anaconda - e.g., it's now capable to resize NTFS partitions. Fedora 9 also contains a preview of the Ext4 filesystem and from now on Kernel 2.6.25. It's remarkable that Fedora is one of the few distributions, which are offering kernel updates during the maintanance period.

The are also two new new features increasing the usability: The new pre-upgrade technology allows the user finally to upgrade directly from an older version to the recent release without needing to reinstall the whole system (or downloading a bunch of CDs), while another feature now includes the possibility to create easily LiveUSB media. One can download a windows executable, which allows the user to put Fedora onto a USB stick and even to create a so called persistent overlay, so that files created during the use of the live-mode won't be deleted.

All in all, Fedora 9 is IMHO a really great release, which highly increases the usability for the user. I'd recommend to try it out, but one should know, that Fedora might not be as easy to use as... openSUSE or Ubuntu (for example if you tak about the support of proprietary software).