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

[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: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...)

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.