Fedora 9 Banner: Promo banner taken from the Fedora Project: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/PromoBanners

This post is from Fedora 9 (Codename: Sulphur), which was release a couple of days ago (13 May 2008).

I had tried the Fedora 9 Preview Live CD and this time went for the normal Install DVD and installed the default Gnome desktop (which much of this post will focus on). First impressions: Very nice.

Quick and dirty Summary

• New look (updated theme and sounds)
• Kernel 2.6.25 - the latest released kernel
• Updated desktop
• New software/package manager (Packagekit)
• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• much much more

About Fedora

Fedora is a rapidly evolving community maintained and Red Hat sponsored distribution which aims to help rapidly develop new open source products and features. Unlike other distributions (Even the Red hat developed RHEL),Software included in the release is expected to be updated newer versions as they become available - not just bug fixes. This means even stable releases of Fedora get new features. Fedora also has a relatively short support lifespan - around 13 months, so it may not be suitable for those who plan on sticking to the same version for a longer period of time.

Visual overview

Fedora 9 comes with updated graphics drivers, and xserver (prerelease for 1.5) which have many touted features which I will not go into. Not messed about much, but it worked, detected the correct resolution. Hopefully accelerated 3d will soon be enabled for my graphics card (Radeon X1950 Pro).

It was disappointing however that to enable the metacity compositing (shadows etc without Open GL/3D), a command line, or the gnome configuration editor (which is not in the default install, nor that simple to use) would be needed - the "desktop effects" in the preferences menu led to a dialogue to enable compiz - which does not work with the current state of drivers for my graphics card.
The default theme (Nodoka) has also had a major facelift. This is the second Fedora release and with it, Nodoka is much improved and outshines Clearlooks in many respects.

The default icon theme (Mist) was also replaced by the "Echo". Echo is currently being targeted and potential default for Fedora 10. There is currently a bug where the menu shows the gnome logo instead of the Fedora logo on the menu.

I noticed that Fedora 9 has system sounds enabled by default. This meant two things:

1. Sound worked out of the box. It always has for me, but Huzzah anyway.
2. The sounds were not jarring. The login tune was sort of uplifting the rest could be classed as pleasant. Shocking stuff.

The latter is a big thing. Before using Windows Vista, I did not think it was possible for system sounds and beeps to be anything but jarring. Along came vista and the sounds were suddenly not too bad. Impressed, I decided to turn on the system sounds in Fedora 8 and was pretty quickly jarred by the beeps. Annoying was not the right term. More like getting smacked in the face.

So, +1 to Fedora 9 and who ever came up with the "pleasant sounds", be it Gnome, Fedora or someone who just had the right itch to scratch.

Package management

PackageKit has replaced the previous graphical package management tools (Pirut for install and remove, pup for update). In general it is a good move (it is fast, stable, and will also be introduced in other distributions too.), but being new software there are a few rough edges that will be smoothed through further updates:

1. Updates are not interactive enough. Upon first log in, I was hit by a security update notification. Clicking the update button updated the packages. However, here there was not way to follow a transaction. I think a notification bubble would be good here.

2. Clicking Review and then clicking updates leaves more or less useless windows behind. Once again it does the job, but i think instead of the status window a notification bubble tracking the transaction would once again be a better option.

3. clicking on a package will automatically install it. Probably what is expected, but past behaviour and muscle memory expects to see a confirmation screen first.

4. A known issue which will be solved very soon, but on the default install, adding software from a new software repository/source that has a security signature is a two step process: After installing the source data (possibly through rpm/packagekit), Choose to install new software. Get hit by a dialogue about importing signature (with a message letting you know that the developers know the current system is suboptimal - they are working on it.). Then once again click on the package. This time clicking install will install it.

Flash, Multimedia

Using Firefox to install Flash complains about some file being missing and then the user is directed to a manual install. Just select "yum" as the method and Packagekit will install the flash software repository. In Add/Remove Software, in addition to "flash plugin", another package will need to be installed: "libflashsupport". This is needed to make sound work. (if the user is using x86_64 version of Fedora, libflashsupport.i386 is required and also nspluginwrapper.i386).

Other notes

There is currently a bug which prevents me from accessing an NTFS partition without jumping through some hoops.

The Future

Fedora will keep on the cutting edge of technology, but the main things I am waiting for are far more shallow:

1. Echo icon theme as default.
2. Gears will become the default theme.