Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Released

BrianGKUAC writes "Fedora 9 has been released as of 10 AM Eastern Time this morning. Release notes can be found here. Some of the more interesting new features include a new package management system, which can be used as an alternative to pup and pirut, known as PackageKit. This release also includes GNOME 2.22 and/or KDE 4.0.3, and Firefox 3 beta 5. Overall, there are a lot of improvements worth looking at, and the Bittorrent seeds are already feeding the release fairly effectively."

Comments

PackageKit

[brejc8]

PackageKit is actually a just a tool which sits on top of yum and does not replace it. It does replace pup and pirut though.

See PackageKit site of the release notes.

Re:PackageKit

[tobiasly]

PackageKit is actually a just a tool which sits on top of yum and does not replace it.

Depends on your definition of yum I guess. It does/can replace yum, the command-line tool, but does not replace the yum database. The wording is misleading though.

PackageKit does not replace yum

[Tester]

PackageKit is only a front-end over yum (or any other backend), it does not replace it.

Konsole disimproving?

[BDaniels]

I'm a sysadmin and use KDE all day long, with Konsole as my terminal. I tried the preview release of Fedora 9 and found
that the new Konsole - has less features!

The buttons for quickly closing/opening a tab are gone. Right-clicking on tabs is gone. The ability to send input to all tabs
is completely gone, not even accessible through menus.

These are features I use every day while working on servers. KDE4 adds a lot of eyecandy (and a Vista-style 'start menu' - ick),
but why remove useful functionality?

Re:Konsole disimproving?

[Peter H.S.]

These are features I use every day while working on servers. KDE4 adds a lot of eyecandy (and a Vista-style 'start menu' - ick),
but why remove useful functionality? Lots of KDE 3.5 features hasn't made it into 4.0 KDE yet. KDE 4.0 is bleeding edge just like Fedora 9 is.

--
Regards

Re:Konsole disimproving?

[AtomicX]

Hello - as the maintainer of Konsole I'll explain what is going on. I'll address specific points first:

> The buttons for quickly closing/opening a tab are gone.

Konsole in KDE 4.0 is orientated more around keyboard shortcuts - which I think makes sense in a terminal. (Ctrl+Shift+N creates a new tab, Ctrl+Shift+W closes the current one, although I would recommend using the normal Ctrl+D combination to exit the shell)

Enough people complained (via bugs.kde.org) that I added the 'New Tab' button back in as an option in KDE 4.1. Plus there are Firefox-esqueue close buttons on tabs and support for re-arranging tabs by drag and drop or moving tabs between windows.

> The ability to send input to all tabs is completely gone

It didn't work at the time of the 4.0 release so it got cut. It has been reimplemented in KDE 4.1 with more flexibility in response to various RFE bug reports:

http://commit-digest.org/issues/2008-04-13/files/konsole-copy-input-to.png

It is not the case the Konsole in KDE 4.0 has 'less features' in total. The menus may look far emptier but there is actually not very much missing. In fact it has quite a few additions, mostly fulfilling a large backlog of feature requests in bugs.kde.org, which I think are very useful:

* The terminal setup UI was replaced with one which is simpler but also more flexible
* Split-view mode
* Incremental search
* Key binding editor
* Improved performance, especially scrolling in large windows

In any case, if you have a complaint then please report it at http://bugs.kde.org/ - I am much more likely to read about it there than on Slashdot. Plus it also allows users to vote on the issues most important to them which is helpful from my perspective trying to allocate the limited spare time I have.

Finally, as someone who followed KDE development discussion quite closely over the last two years, it is inaccurate to say that KDE is attempting to "copy" Windows Vista or is in some large measure "inspired" by it. The menu for example was originally developed by OpenSuSE for KDE 3 - a long time before Vista was released, based on openSuSE's own research. Evidence of this can be found in some notably different design decisions compared with Vista's menu. For example, both the Gnome SLED menu and KDE's "Kickoff" have a search facility but it is located at the top of the menu rather than the button because users couldn't find it when it was placed at the bottom.

I think the view that KDE is trying to "clone" Windows, if not trolling, boils down to the use of black on the bar at the bottom of the screen. I am not involved with that part of KDE but I understand that the look of it is quite likely to change somewhat for KDE 4.1.

Re:Beta software in a production release?

[wizardforce]

Firefox 3 is set to be released in June, the next Fedora release will be much later, the same decision was made with Ubuntu Hardy which is a LTS release so it would make some sense to have the latest browser version as it's not too far from the actual release date for FF3. but assuming you don't like FF3, there is nothing stopping you from installing FF2 instead, your FF profile works fine on both anyway.

Beta XORG as well

[fyrie]

I can live with the beta Firefox, but the fact that they are using a beta XORG has put a kink in my plans to upgrade to F9 because NVidia doesn't have drivers ready. I'm anxiously awaiting this situation to be resolved. In the meantime I'll stick with F8 which is very stable at the moment.

Re:Beta XORG as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Check here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=9959d4806fa0925ec3b511c7d038fcb8&t=111460

and download the 173.08 with experimental support for xorg-server 1.4.99.901

Re:Beta XORG as well

[tuffy]

Beta NVidia drivers are available for the beta x.org server. There's also the Nouveau drivers, which might be good enough for 2D performance.

Re:Beta XORG as well

[mauriatm]

Check here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=9959d4806fa0925ec3b511c7d038fcb8&t=111460 and download the 173.08 with experimental support for xorg-server 1.4.99.901

Sorry but those have been available for a month now and for the most part they don't do much. If you follow those instructions you'll just get a Nvidia 2D driver. The Livna packagers have not pushed the Nvidia driver out of the development repository also.

Basically Nvidia Accelerated 3D will have to wait (compiz,etc.).

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same printer. You got off easy, believe me. When I tried to use the Samsung software, it changed all the permissions of my root partition, and I had to re-install. I had followed the instructions, too.

What I did the SECOND time is, I threw away the Samsung disk and went into the printer management tool. I added a new printer, but instead of a 2510, I used one of the older ones; a 2250, I think. That worked perfectly, and I was able to use the printer without further incident.

This one is Samsung's fault, not Fedora's. Be fair.

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[Otter]

I have the same printer (as you say, it's touted for having good Linux support) and followed the instructions in a Gentoo forum thread to ignore the driver CD and just use CUPS. That worked perfectly, FWIW. (Of course, getting it supported by my Mac took maybe 5 seconds, but so it goes...)

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[LnxRocks]

Check here http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-2510

also, do an lsusb to ensure the printer appears

Will not install on Samsung hard disks

[kriston]

Fedora 9 will not install on certain Samsung hard disks.

If your hard disk has a "/" character in its model name as reported through the ATA interface then Anaconda will fail. The Python error message reads like "ends with '/' and is not just '/'" and the kernel halts.

I have a very standard desktop Dell Optiplex that has one of these hard disks, model number "SAMSUNG HD080HJ/P".

The "/" character kills the installation.

So disappointing yet so simple to have fixed before release.

Re:Will not install on Samsung hard disks

[pmgst17]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442457

As for the status of the fix, I don't know.

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[Peter H.S.]

I will recount my I had trouble with the last Fedora Distro.
  I bought myself a second hand Samsung ML-2510 printer that Samsung touted as "supported" under some Linux kernel version and later. You are not the only person that seems to have trouble with the binary drivers, look here:
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-2510_parallel_with_Samsung_PPD
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-2510

There seems to be some workaround though, so it should work.

Anyway, http://www.openprinting.org/ is a good place to start regarding printing support.

--
Regards

Re:Firefox 3 BETA ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a bug in the Linux version of FF3b5 associated with the phishing/malware detection and the sqlite database used to store the url-classifier data. As the database is populated with downloaded Google data, around mid-point it starts churning the hard drive and consuming IO resources causing that spike you see and affecting system performance. The workaround is to disable the phish/malware detection stuff, and delete the sqlite db files in your Mozilla profile. They'll be recreated on the next session, but will never get beyond ~9k.

Re:Now why did I ...

[lattyware]

Old-fashioned? You mean English as opposed to American, right? (Correct as opposed to wrong.)

Sulphur story

[BytePusher]

I thought the name Sulphur was kind of... lame, so I decided to see what the name was about. The truth is, it was the least bad of all the names voted upon.
 
The logic behind it is thus:
Some more suggestions

  "sulphur"
  "mayonaisse"

(like werewolves they react badly with silver)
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-December/msg01194.html
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Names
The other options were:
vote_count , name
                62 , Sulphur
                54 , Bathysphere
                43 , Chupacabra
                39 , Mayonnaise
                32 , Dragicorn
                29 , Woodwose
                23 , Tourette
                13 , Asperger
                13 , Barmanou
                10 , Chingachgook
                  6 , Kingsport Town
                  5 , Marfan

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-January/msg00012.html

Re:Beta software in a production release?

[jensend]

Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox 1.5 in May 2007- 7 months after 2.0 was released. I'd imagine support for the 2.0 branch may be a bit longer than that but it certainly wouldn't be more than a year. FF3 may not be supported in 3 years but by the time it isn't getting security updates from Mozilla Hardy Heron will be close to EOL anyway.

And the alternative is?

[FranTaylor]

Well, the alternative is to make everyone march to some sort of schedule, which not even Microsoft can do.

The idea of Fedora is to push things along. If you are writing software or need the new features, yay!

If you are more happy with stability, CentOS is what you are looking for. Same stuff, but older and more stable.

Re:Does YouTube work?

[Brebs]

Yes, YouTube works. With SELinux on.