Fedora 9 Alpha Released, Codename Sulphur

Dark Star · 05-02-2008, 10:48 PM

Jesse Keating has announced the availability of Fedora 9 Alpha, the first development release of Fedora 9.The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

Release Overview : -

Kernel 2.6.24 : - Fedora 9 Alpha features a 2.6.24 based kernel. 2.6.24 includes CPU "group scheduling", memory fragmentation avoidance, tickless support for x86-64/ppc and other architectures, many new wireless drivers and a new wireless configuration interface, SPI/SDIO MMC support, USB authorization, per-device dirty memory thresholds, support for PID and network namespaces, support for static probe markers, read-only bind mounts, SELinux performance improvements, SATA link power management and port multiplier support, Large Receive Offload in network devices, memory hot-remove support, a new framework for controlling the idle processor power management, CIFS ACLs support, many new drivers and many other features and fixes.
GNOME 2.21 Development Release : - GNOME 2.21 brings many improvements, not least of which is the introduction of GVFS and GIO as a replacement for GNOME VFS by Fedora developer and nautilus maintainer AlexanderLarsson. GVFS introduces many benefits including performance improvements, queuing multiple file transfers and additional security benefits through the use of PolicyKit, which is developed and maintained by Fedora developer DavidZeuthen and was first introduced in Fedora 8.

GNOME 2.21 also comes with a new world clock applet which displays the time and weather conditions for multiple time zones at the same time.
KDE 4.0 : - KDE 4.0 features upgrades to core components such as the port to QT 4. It also introduces a number of brand new frameworks such as the Phonon, a multimedia API; Solid, a hardware integration framework; Plasma, a re-written desktop and panel with many new concepts; integrated desktop search; compositing as a feature of KWin; and a brand new visual style called Oxygen.
Firefox 3 Beta 2 : - Firefox 3 Beta 2 brings a number of major improvements including a native look and feel, desktop integration, the new Places replacement for bookmarks and a re-worked address bar.
Anaconda Installer Improvements : - The Anaconda team is actively developing a number of new features for Fedora 9. The Alpha release includes the following new features:
- Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions. Watch a screencast.
- Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems.
- Improved Rescue Mode (FirstAidKit).
- Allow the user to set the install source during the second stage of installation.
- Use libblkid for filesystem probing.
FreeIPA : - FreeIPA makes managing auditing, identity and policy processes easier by providing web-based and command line provisioning and administration tools that takes the pain away from system administration: it combines the power of the Fedora Directory Server with FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution.
PackageKit : - PackageKit is a cross-distribution package management solution that has a complete yum backend. It has been designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, with its primary goal to unify all the graphical package management tools used in different distributions. To do this it makes use of some of the latest technologies such as PolicyKit and D-Bus. It is available in the repositories of this release as an alternative package management system using the yum backend.
Fast X: - In the opinion of Fedora developers, X takes too long to start up slowing down many aspects of the system including boot, logout and fast user switching. The goal of this project is to tune and make some architectural changes to X so that it can go from exec to ready to accept clients in one second.