Fedora 9 Released (Sulphur)

Red Hat's Fedora Project released Fedora 9 yesterday May 13th, the newest version of its open source    operating system.

Fedora 9 adds key new features to the Linux OS including the addition of the KDE 4 desktop environment that defines the look and feel of this OS. Another key feature added is the ability to run the Fedora 9 OS from a USB drive. You can not only boot the OS from a USB drive, but can also add applications and store data to the drive (a true portable OS).

This is the first major release of Fedora to include the KDE 4.x desktop environment and with it comes new features such as desktop panels that integrate desktop search.

Fedora is one of several Linux flavors currently available, with other well known ones including Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora being the core project for testing applications to be added into a more stable RHEL, it paves to be the testing ground for upcoming applications in the RHEL and totaly free to use, unlike RHEL which comes with the technical support

Fedora 9 is newest evolution of the Fedora distribution 
Some of the new features of Fedora 9(Sulphur) include :

• GNOME 2.22
  
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• KDE 4 : which is not among the stable version and i'd personally prefer for 4.1 version which is expected to be more stable than the 4.0 version
  
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• OpenJDK 6 has replaced IcedTea.: For known reasons the sun's Java development kit is being replaced with redhats icedtea
  
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• ext4 is now supported.
  
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• PackageKit is included as a front-end to yum, and as the default package manager (Pup and Pirut are available as alternatives).
  
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• One Second X allows the X to go from exec to ready to accept clients in nearly one second
  
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• Many improvements to the Anaconda installer;[45] among these features, it now supports resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS file systems, and can create and install Fedora to encrypted file systems.
  
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• Firefox 3.0 beta 5 is included in this release.
  
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• Perl 5.10.0, which features a smaller memory footprint and other improvements.
  
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• The swfdec package, which decodes and renders Flash animations and videos, is now installed by default.
  
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• It is said that Fedora 9 has kernel based mode setting hope someone tests this out as soon as possible
  
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• Perl 5.10.0 is one that will make a difference.(Especially if your code uses regular expressions heavily.)
  
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• A new code base for TeTex.
  
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• A new version of OCAML.
  
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• Fedora 9 features a new artwork entitled Waves which, like Infinity in Fedora 8, changes the wallpaper during the day to reflect the time of day.
  

Many things have been upgraded here, not just the unstable bits.

Some of the Drawbacks which would prevent you to from installing Fedora 9 are :

• KDE 4.0 which isn't that stable,i'd personally wait for the stabler 4.1 version before checking out KDE for sure
  
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• NVidia doesn't have drivers ready, it only has beta drivers available at this point of time
  
• available at http://sulphur.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=238
  
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• there has been problems on installing in Samsung hard drives which shouldn't be a problem for most of us, but is a hitch when you consider the Hardware Compatibility of previous fedora releases.
  

On the funny side of it :
The codename Sulphur for the project was actually elected to be called this way.
[1] [2] [3]
 

No matter what you do, some major component will always be not ready. If it is not KDE, it is Gnome or xorg or Apache or Firefox or whatever.Every release has this problem, not just Fedora 9.

I'll wait for a better Seed to leech ratio for it to be downloaded and wouldn't wait for a long time to get my hands dirty on this release


You can read more about the full release here and download it from the Fedora Project.