The first alpha release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) has been announced. An alpha release is similar to what Debian calls testing. An alpha release represents a sanitized snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release. Having said that, alpha releases should boot normally on most systems. By trying out an alpha release, the Linux users provide developers the much needed feedback on the changes and any bugs they encounter.
Fedora 9 Alpha release provides a peek into what to expect in the next major release of Fedora which is tentatively scheduled for late April. Some of the features and improvements in Fedora 9 are as follows :
- GNOME 2.21
- KDE 4.0 as the default KDE desktop
- Firefox 3 Beta 2
- Anaconda installer improvements - Now you can resize the Ext2, Ext3 and NTFS partitions among other things.
- PackageKit - This is to Fedora what Synaptic is to Debian based Linux distribution. PackageKit acts as a front end to Yum.
- Decrease the startup time of X window system.
- Linux kernel 2.6.24
- Ext4 filesystem support - Ext4 is more scalable and better performing than Ext3.
You can download the alpha 1 release from the Fedora web site. For more details, see the Fedora release notes, planned schedule and feature list.
