Fedora 9 Preview Cleared for Launch

According to a post made yesterday to the Fedora announce mailing list, a Fedora 9 preview has been cleared for launch. "This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we hope). [...] Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked 'F9-Preview.'"

Comments

Fedora 9 Not Ready

[nmb3000]

I dunno. I hear that Fedora 9 is really lacking in important functionality. Why would I want to install something so obviously half-baked like this?

With serious issues like this, obviously 2008 won't be The Year of the Linux Desktop (Really This Time, We Mean It).

Re:Differences

[zedlander]

Fedora vs. Ubuntu

like it, but

[thermian]

This issue of not having media codecs other then the free ones is a real deal breaker for me.

Yes I know, they aren't 'free as in freedom'. Sad, but true. However, when I install desktop linux I don't want to fart about trying to find media codecs. They should be there, in the install, or immediately available via an obvious link once installation is complete. It should be a one click and done experience, has to be really.

Yes I could find them myself, but I'm not really the problem, since I'm pretty much addicted to linux for everything but desktop. I'll remain a fan, and live in hope of a decent out of the box desktop experience.

No, the problem is the vast numbers of techno numpties who won't use linux as long as it has this glaring hole in its out of the box state.

Mark me as troll if you wish, but this is a serious issue that the purists don't want to confront. In spite of what they beleive, ogg is not enough...

Re:like it, but

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

Yeah. It'd be great, if it wasn't illegal.

Here's the thing: it's not solely a matter of principle. Fedora has to play by a harder set of rules than Ubuntu. Fedora is backed by a public company, based in the US, so they answer to US law and Red Hat stockholders. And under US law, CYA just isn't enough, especially when there's multi-billion-dollar global megacorps who will take any opportunity they can find to sue you into oblivion.

Everyone would dearly love to be able to include mp3 codecs and ffmpeg and all that non-Free stuff. But they can't. So Red Hat and Fedora keep fighting the good fight - lobbying against software patents, pushing for open standards - and still people give them shit because they have to click two places instead of one to get MP3 support.

Way to focus on the big problems, people.

Re:like it, but

[techno-vampire]

The aforementionned person new to linux will get Ubuntu.

I've been using Fedora along with Windows for a number of years now. My sister has an older machine (800mhz) and Win2K was getting slower and slower, even with all the firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware stuph. In fact, it was the anti-virus that was slowing it down more than anything else; the daily scans took forever and made it almost unresponsive. Then, she tried a Live CD of Ubuntu. In less than 15 minutes she knew it was for her. The next morning, she installed it. The first time it rebooted, it let her know she needed proprietary drivers for her nVidia Geoforce video card and got them. It's now her main OS, and Win2K is the Dark Side to her. I'm happy with Fedora, and will be moving from 8 to 9 when the time comes, but I'd never have suggested it to her. Fedora's a geeky, bleeding edge test bed of a distro, and all she wants or needs is something that Just Works. That's why there are so many Linux distros: different people need and/or want different things, and no matter what you want in the way of Linux, there's at least one distro that's right for you.

Re:Differences

[Phisbut]

I would find an RPM of something I wanted to install, it required me to first find and install another RPM, etc. Sometimes one of the dependant RPM's would not install, because I had a newer/older version for another program. Apt-get has worked flawlessly for me, and the HUGE pool of apps that just work has made it so I almost never have to search for .DEB files.

Comparing RPM to apt-get is apples to oranges. Either compare RPM to DEB, or yum to apt-get. I never had to bother with dependencies when using yum, just as you've never had to bother with dependencies using apt-get.