14 DAY TRIAL // With small steps, we're getting closer to the final release of Fedora 9, one of the most important Linux distributions at the moment. Although it was scheduled for the 29th of April, Fedora 9 will be actually launched on May 13, a decision taken by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). But until then, users can enjoy the Fedora 9 Preview version, which is very close to how the final product will look like.
Due to some technical issues, the Preview was also delayed a few days. With it, the developers are trying to find most of the remaining bugs. Jesse Keating said on the fedora-devel-announce mailing list: "Because of other slippage, coupled with some technical difficulties during this previous week, our Preview Release was unexpectedly stalled. The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the final spit-and-polish. There needs to be sufficient time between the PR and the release for testers to find and report issues."
The decision to move the Fedora 9 release date by two weeks was not taken to make space for more changes or additions, but to solve the problems that are already known, find new things that are considered to block the release, and fix them. By giving the Preview release to a larger audience the developers also want to make sure that the discovered bugs are completely repaired.
Jesse Keating added: "This slip is not intended to make room for more changes, it is only intended to make room for fixing the things we already know about, and allowing new things to be found, and evaluated as release blocking, and fixed. There are also a fair number of bugs we think we've already fixed, but need wider audience testing to be sure."
Download Fedora 8 right now from Softpedia. Download Fedora 9 Preview right now from Softpedia. Please note that this is a development release and should NOT be used on production machines.