Fedora 9 Beta Preview
With upgrading against GNOME 2.22 comes updates to the latest upstream version of the GNOME Desktop Manager (GDM) and moving to the new Gvfs file-system, which replaces gnome-vfs. PackageKit has also appeared in Fedora as an alternative package management system. Continuing on the GNOME front, Red Hat is complete with their new NetworkManager goals for Fedora Sulphur. NetworkManager in Fedora 9 supports the new system-wide configuration daemon, multiple network devices can now be activated at the same time, ad-hoc support has been implemented, the network/Internet connection on Linux can now be shared through NetworkManager, and PPP support for mobile GSM/CDMA broadband devices. CDMA and GSM device detection is now supported in NetworkManager and its applet, but for the mobile broadband support, there is no GUI yet for entering authentication information and entering the SIM card PIN code. While Bluetooth did receive some Fedora love in this release, Bluetooth support within NetworkManager has been postponed to Fedora 10.
GCC 4.3.0 can be found in Fedora 9, which has many improvements to this compiler collection such as SSE4 support. In the path to KDE 4, all core KDE modules have been updated to KDE 4.0.2 and kdegames3 (along with other packages that haven't yet had any Qt4/KDE4 love) is still shipping in Fedora 9 since all KDE software has yet to be ported. Fedora 9 is tracking the latest development progress of the Linux 2.6.25 kernel, which is expected to be released within the next couple of days. PERL 5.10 is another notable package that has been updated in Rawhide for Fedora 9.
Jigdo support will be available for Fedora 9. For those out of the loop, Jigdo allows the user to attain ISO distribution images from supported mirrors through a process of downloading many small portions of the software and then the Jigdo client software assembles the ISO image once all of the portions have been downloaded. Fedora will continue, however, to be distributed by HTTP/FTP and Bit Torrent as well with the full ISOs.
The final release of Fedora 9 "Sulphur" is planned for Tuesday, April 29. The third and final pre-release of Fedora 9 is tentatively scheduled for April 10. More information on the forthcoming release of Fedora 9 is available from the Fedora Wiki.
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