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

Not Fedora's Fault

[FranTaylor]

It is not Fedora's fault that Samsung has such crappy driver support.

You never even mentioned if you tried another distribution. Did you? Did you determine whether it's a Fedora issue or a CUPS issue? Did you file bug reports?

Anyone who complains about Linux problems but does not fill out bug reports is just an asshat as far as I am concerned. You are willing to leech from the efforts of others but you are not willing to make a contribution when the opportunity is right in front of you. Blah.

This particular printer was also advertised as having OSX driver support, but the driver is not available in the US unless you lie to their web site and tell them you are from Australia. Tell Samsung to get off their butts and make sure their printers work right in Linux AND OSX.

Re:Not Fedora's Fault

[mrbanzai]

So what you're saying is that this OS is essentially worthless for normal users. Correct? And I suppose that's fine. Let's just not pretend Joe Windows can install this and be on his way, like he would with something like Ubuntu or Xandros.

The same issue would have been encountered with Ubuntu and Xandros. The grandparent attempted to use the provided Samsung drivers, which do not function correctly in Linux. CUPS happens to have a functioning driver, but you have to configure it for a different printer model for it to work.

Fedora has functioned wonderfully as an OS for normal users, my grandparents included. There are always some usability issues when compared to Windows, but those are generally to be attributed to driver support more than distribution-specific implementations. Ubuntu has some simple interfaces, but I do get tired of this assumption that it is a perfect Linux distribution with regard to "Joe Windows".

Re:Not Fedora's Fault

[FranTaylor]

Who are you kidding? I have half a dozen random junk PCs, x86, x86_64, PPC, and Fedora installs on all of them without issue.

Anyone can fill out a bug report, even normal users. No programming skills are necessary.

Yes, yes, yes. And more too. Fedora is not for everyone and it makes no claim to that. I run Fedora on my laptop because it has better hardware support for that particular model than Ubuntu. I run it on my desktop because I need it for the software I work with. I run it on my server because all the server packages are already configured just the way I like them. I run it in general because I really like SELinux and Fedora is where SELinux development is happening.

Firefox 3 BETA ?

[Superken7]

Why is it so common nowadays for linux distributions to include *BETA* software (as complex as a browser can be) in their releases?
Sure, there can be some heavily tested and simple programs left as beta, but firefox? The web browser is a heavily used and substantial tool these days..

Firefox 3 Beta 5 takes my CPU usage to 100% easily, while firefox 2.x does not.

is it so hard to stick with stable, tested software ? bleeding edge is not always better.

Not to speak of KDE 4.0 :)

Re:Beta software in a production release?

[dotancohen]

Why not error on the side of stability then, and ship Firefox 2. For everyone who really needs to have Firefox 3, they are free to install it themselves. Because then they'd have to support it. In the case of LTS Ubuntu, that's 3 years, and Mozilla will not be supporting Fx2 for the next 3 years. Now was a really bad time to release an LTS, or at least, have Firefox as the included browser in an LTS. For similar reasons regarding KDE[3|4] Kubuntu 8.04 is not LTS.

Re:FedoraSoft

[Peter H.S.]

It's been a long time since I've heard any excitement about Fedora. The Linux buzz has moved on while RedHat lives in it's own little world, no longer cutting edge and as stuffy as Microsoft... Well, Mr. Frosty Piss, I really do think you have followed Fedora that closely; stuff like LVM, selinux tend to appear in Fedora before any other distro. This release has KDE 4.03, PackageKit, kernel modesetting, EXT4 (preview), OpenJDK 6 etc. If you don't find that stuff exciting hand over your geek card.

Me, a personally doesn't give a damn about "buzz", I want a nice solid but modern distro that is free as in free speech, and Fedora is just that.

Btw. next time you bad mouth Red Hat, which seems to be popular though lame attitude among certain people, just remember which Linux vendor who has contributed the most to make Linux what it is today, and how much Red Hat still contributes to core linux technology. And Red Hat has never, ever waivered in its support of Free, OSS software, and eg. released some proprietary closed source software as part of their distros,

--
Regards

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[X0563511]

Your Mac uses CUPS. Pop open your Mac and go to http://localhost:631/ and you will see.

Re:Will not install on Samsung hard disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone did. Too bad you jump down peoples throats over your ignorance of the facts.

Pricks like you that are rude, with bad attitudes, and noses high in the air are a great reason for the majority of other alternative OS's to ignore the Linux community when they get treated like this.

Maybe you should have ended your post with RTFM if your only purpose in life is to piss people off.

Read this and get over yourself or even better go crawl back into your miserable dark little hole.

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

Regards

Re:Release schedules

[Black Art]

One thing which the Ubuntu and Fedora releases show is that having regularly scheduled releases does not always work out for the best. Both have shipped with a primary browser still in beta (FF3 is a big leap ahead, but it still has some issues to be shaken out), and Ubuntu will be doing long-term support for an outdated GCC version which misses out on a lot of improvements while Fedora uses a brand new .0 compiler. Seems like both projects might have had better releases a month or so later. No matter what you do, some major component is not ready. If it is not KDE, it is Gnome or xorg or Apache or Firefox or whatever.

There are a bunch of components in this release that were ready in time. Perl 5.10.0 is one that will make a difference. (Especially if your code uses regular expressions heavily.) There is also a new code base for TeTex. A new version of OCAML. Many things have been upgraded here, not just the unstable bits.

Every release has this problem, not just Fedora 9.

Re:Hope my issues with Fedora are solved

[techno-vampire]

Guys, it's [still] pathetic in the Linux world and progress is very very slow.

I see: you had trouble installing a printer that came with wrong instructions and an install CD that didn't work the way it should so Linux itself is bad. Has it occurred to you that the OEM may have given you the wrong instructions, or possibly instructions that only work for some other distro? Nah, it couldn't be...