Fedora 9 is now available - http://get.fedoraproject.org/ 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.
Fedora has always been a place where new technologies can be found and worked with. Fedora 9 is no exception. Some major enhancements in Fedora 9 include:
- PackageKit - A new graphical interface for package management.
- KDE 4
- Firefox 3
- OpenJDK6
- Encrypted root filesystem support
- Preupgrade abilities from Fedora 8
- Persistent Live USB support
- FreeIPA for identity management
- Upstart
- EXT4 support
Take a look, check them out. Every time I write one of these things someone says “no thanks, I’ll stick with Debian” or some other distro. To those people I say, super! Different distro’s for different use cases. But 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?
You can download Fedora 9 as a live or installable image at http://get.fedoraproject.org/. To learn more about getting involved and getting started with Fedora go to http://join.fedoraproject.org/ The Fedora 10 alpha freeze is only 2 months away! Come be a part of it!
