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

So

[sveard]

What smell is that? :p

You forgot the most important feature...

[eck06]

- Uses seeding with openssl

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.

Seed, damn you!

[bignetbuy]

download pegged at 892KBps. An hour to snatch the DVD ISO!

SEED, you bums! SEED!

Re:Seed, damn you!

[Dog-Cow]

Some Debian guy removed the seed code so Red Hat would be slower!

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?

[icydog]

IIRC, KDE said that 4.1 will have feature parity with 3.5. 4.0 is still a work-in-progress. I do agree though, I use konsole all the time and it's rather unpleasant right now. 4.0 is also missing a bunch of other basic stuff, like dragging between the two panes (files and the folder tree) in Konqueror.

Re:Konsole disimproving?

[SlashdotOgre]

"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!"

They must be going for the Gnome look...

All kidding aside, I'm very surprised they went with KDE4. I've been playing around with it on Gentoo for several months now, and I could understand making it an option, but to not provide KDE3 out of the box at all (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-KDE) is shocking. I thought even the KDE folks were recommending waiting until 4.1. Oh well, Fedora always likes the latest and greatest.

Re:Konsole disimproving?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm a sysadmin and use KDE all day long... Oh, come on, we're supposed to believe THAT? If you were a REAL sysadmin, you'd use twm at most! And you wouldn't ADMIT to having X11 installed at all! You'd talk about how console mode lets you do everything faster, and how bloated X11 is compared to X10...

Re:Konsole disimproving?

[CastrTroy]

I'm surprised they didn't offer both as an option. Mandriva 2008.1 has KDE3 by default, and an optional KDE4 install. You can install both, and select which one you want from the login screen. It's way too early to force KDE4 on everyone. A lot of features are still missing, and it's still pretty unstable. For the Record Mandriva 2009, plans to be KDE4 only. Hopefully KDE4 will be more mature by then.

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:Marketing 101

[creepynut]

"AssTard", you make an excellent point! Thank you for your input!

Anyone test out the Kernel Based Mode Setting yet?

[BrookHarty]

This was the feature I was waiting for, was hoping to hear more about it when Fedora 9 was released.

The article (or snippit) says Fedora 9 has kernel based mode setting..

http://www.osnews.com/story/19661/A_Preview_of_Kernel-Based_Mode-Setting

Anyone test it yet?

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...)

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".

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:Beta software in a production release?

[ettlz]

Funny thing though, it never crashes.

You should tinker with the kernel features more. ;)

Re:Beta software in a production release?

[shentino]

Firefox...Sulphur... ...Yup, this release is going to bomb

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

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

Release schedules

[jensend]

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.

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...