The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited! Oh, and if you want other people to feel as excited about Fedora 9 as you’re going to once you’ve finished reading this article, why not give it a digg.

New Desktops

Fedora 9 ships with GNOME 2.22 and KDE 4.03 by default, and while KDE 4.0x has received a lot of attention and buzz in the free software world, this GNOME release is also very exciting.

Softpedia called it “A truly amazing desktop!”, and with features like Cheese, the new international clock and integrated window compositing they could be right. One significant feature that has appeared in this release that has come from active Fedora developer Alexander Larsson is the improved file management abilities provided by GVFS, allowing the queuing of file transfers and increased resilience to failures. Also new in GNOME for Fedora 9 is integration of support for the X RandR extension: this allows a user to do many things, including drag and drop configuration of multi-head monitor set-ups. This particular feature landed too late to make it upstream for the 2.22 release, but it will be included in the next up-stream release; it has already been taken up by other distributions too, so great work Søren! If this feature interests you, check out this cool video on John Palmieri’s blog that shows it in action.

As I said already, KDE 4.03 is set to be included in the final release as the default KDE option. Traditionally, Fedora has been seen as a GNOME centric distribution, but as a result of the hard work of the KDE SIG [Special Interest Group] this is no longer the case and KDE can be seen as an equal citizen in Fedora. The fact that Fedora is set to be the first major distribution to ship KDE 4 by default, and with so much attention given to the details such as ensuring that all KDE 3.x applications will continue to work, demonstrates Fedora’s ongoing commitment to providing users with the latest and greatest free software on a stable platform, while providing upstream developers with increased exposure which is guaranteed to improve the quality of their software.

NetworkManager

NetworkManager has received a lot of attention this release. Perhaps the most significant change is that NetworkManager is now the default across the entire system. The result of this is that it is now started earlier in the boot sequence to ensure that your network is available when you log in, and also it has now been extended to allow you to edit your system-wide network configurations via NetworkManager. Other improvements include the ability to have multiple devices active at the same time, allowing connection sharing and ad-hoc networking like in the OLPC.

If you’re a mobile user, one feature that you’re probably going to find more exciting than any of the above is the ability to plug in a CDMA or GSM device and have it recognised and working with no configuration required! This work has been done by Fedora’s very own Dan Williams, and you can find out more about it on his blog or in this interview with him.

PackageKit and Yum

Fedora developer and user Richard Hughes started work on the PackageKit project to provide a common interface to all the package management back-ends that exist in the Linux world, and to try and help ensure end-users get to use a sane interface. Already, PackageKit has a lot of traction with support coming from many other distributions and as a result it can now be used with the following back-ends: yum, yum2, zypp, smart, apt, apt2, conary and many many more. PackgeKit is going to be replacing Pirut and Pup as the default GUI package management solution in Fedora 9.

Yum, which is used as PackageKit’s back-end in Fedora, has also received many more speed improvements; people who claim that it is slow should definitely take another look this release.

Encrypted Installations and Partition Resizing

Another big plus for mobile users in this release is the ability to create and install Fedora on encrypted partitions. So, besides the pain of loosing a computer, at least you won’t have to worry about how safe your data is any more if you do misplace your laptop. Maybe this is an even bigger plus for employers, especially here in the UK where I’ve lost count of the number of discs and laptops that have been lost by various parts of the civil service with valuable data on it!

And for those users coming from another operating system (Linux or Windows) that want to set their system up to dual boot, they’ll be pleased to see the introduction of support for resizing ext2/3 and NTFS partitions from within the installer.

Look out for an interview with the Anaconda development team in the near future about these new features!

Live Persistence

With Fedora’s focus on live CDs and respinning technology over the past two releases, it would be surprising not to see a new technology along these lines this time, and you won’t be disappointed either! Fedora 8 made it easy for you to create your own custom version of Fedora, whether for distribution as a traditional install disc, or as a live CD with whatever packages you desire. Fedora 9 takes this one step further and makes it easy for you to put your custom version of Fedora onto a USB stick and have the ability to store the data you create on the same drive! Where ever you go, you can have all your applications, your settings, and your data with you, leaving you in control of your privacy and security.

Jeremy Katz was kind enough to take the time to talk to us about this feature, and you can find the resulting interview here. It has lots more details about the feature, and how you can start to make use of it yourself.

More More More!

Why stop at 5! There’s many other great new features in Fedora 9 which you can look forward to. Check out the Fedora 9 feature list for more details about the technologies mentioned here, as well as information about many other improvements and brand new developments. Included is further work building on the bluetooth developments of Fedora 8; FreeIPA, a technology for enabling easy management of identity, policy and auditing processes; ext4 file system support; mammoth virtualisation improvements; Firefox 3; a brand new version of X with lots of speed improvements; PreUpgrade; Upstart…heck, the list goes on!

Congratulations to the Fedora team for their hard work during this release cycle, and good luck with all the bug squashing you have ahead of you I should also extend my thanks to everyone who contributes to the upstream projects too!