14 DAY TRIAL // After having been delayed for a few days, Fedora 9 Beta was released yesterday. This is the point when developers need a lot of participation from users who can get the distribution and test it out on their machines.
The final release of Fedora 9 will look almost the same as the Beta, except for some fixes to increase stability, performance and usability. The most important highlights of Fedora 9 Beta are: ￭ The GNOME 2.22 desktop environment, featuring better file system performance, security improvements, better Bluetooth integration, power management at the login screen, a clock that displays the time all over the globe - very helpful when you communicate with persons all around the planet, and you need to schedule a meeting or something similar - and many other enhancements.
￭ KDE 4.0.2, with a new desktop and panel that bring new concepts, like integrated desktop search, the visual style Oxygen, the Phonon multimedia API and the fresh hardware integration framework called Solid.
￭ Firefox 3 Beta 5, that features a native look and feel, integrating much better into Fedora, with bookmarks replaced by Places and a modified address bar. Fedora now ships a free software flash browser plugin, thanks to the swfdec that changed to a GStreamer backend. It can now play flash content like videos, animation and games out of the box.
￭ During the installation the user can resize ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions, and also can create and set up encryted filesystems. The Anaconda installer now uses libblkid for filesystem probing, and in case you want test out the experimental ext4 filesystem, you should specify this by using the boot option "iamanext4developer". The hardware probing and detection is now done by using udev and HAL rather than kudzu.
￭ PackageKit, the cross-distribution package management application, comes with a yum backend, and unifies different distributions' software management with the latest technologies. Besides the above mentioned features, Fedora 9 Beta brings you the latest release of the Linux kernel, 2.6.25-rc5.
Download Fedora 9 Beta right now from Softpedia. Please note that this is a development release, it should not be used on production machines.