Fedora 9 Released
Posted May 14th, 2008 in Linux/Unix/BSD
Fedora 9 was released on May 13th 2008. You can buy Fedora 9 from the Linux CD Mall and this post highlights some of the changes and features of Fedora 9.
Release Notes
If you are considering installing or upgrading Fedora 9, I highly recommend having a good look through the release notes on the Fedora Project website before you do so. I have summarised below some of the interesting parts of the release notes.
Live and Install
Fedora 9 comes in either "live" or "install" flavours. The live versions allow you to boot Fedora directly off a CD into a working desktop without installing anything to your computer. You can use a live version to try Fedora out and also see if it works well with your hardware. The live editions are available with either the Gnome (2.22) or KDE (4.0.3) desktops and for the i386 / 32 bit or x86_64 / 64 bit platforms. There are no PPC versions of the live CDs. The live CDs allow you to then install Fedora to your computer from the desktop if you so choose.
The install media comes on either CDs or a single DVD and for i386 / 32 bit, x86_64 / 64 bit, and PPC for older Mac computers. The 32bit flavour comes on 6 CDs and the others on 7. The install version has more software available without having to download and you are able to install both the Gnome and KDE desktops (and Xfce too) if you want to. You won't have to download as much additional software as you customise your system with the full install version than the live version.
Installation Guide
There is a comprehensive installation guide on the Fedora Project website.
Hardware Requirements
For the x86 / 32 bit platform, Fedora recommends at least a 400 MHz Pentium II or better processor and 256MB of RAM for graphical mode. More RAM is always better...
For the x86_64 / 64 bit platform, Fedora recommends 512MB of RAM for graphical mode. Because these are newer processors than 32 bit there's no minimum recommendation for a processor; they should all be good enough.
For the PPC platform, Fedora recomments a 400 MHz G3 or better processor with 256MB of RAM.
Gnome
The version of the Gnome desktop manager with Fedora 9 is 2.22
KDE
The KDE version in Fedora 9 is 4.0.3 and KDE 3.x is not included at all. Note that Plasma replaces the old Kicker and KDesktop, and the KDM login manager uses a new theme format. KDM themes written for KDE 3 do not work with the KDM in KDE 4.
Xfce
Xfce 4.4.2 is included on the install media but there is not curretly a live CD version for Xfce. There will likely be a "spin" created for a live version of Xfce at a later time which is what happened with Fedora 8.
Firefox
Fedora 9 comes with Firefox 3.0 beta 5.
ext4 File System
The new ext4 file system is available in Fedora 9 as a nearly feature complete preview. It is possible to install onto an ext4 partition by adding the "ext4" boot parameter when booting into the installer and selecting custom partitioning, but given ext4 is still not complete this may not be a good idea.
Multimedia
As usual, Fedora ships without MP3 or DVD playback support because both formats are patent encumbered.
Buy Fedora 9
As with all the major Linux distributions, you can buy Fedora 9 from my Linux CD Mall website.
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