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Operating Systems Software Upgrades

Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released 62

Posted by kdawson from the they-really-spell-it-that-way dept.
JonRob writes "The first development snapshot of Fedora 9 (Sulphur) has been released, providing both a KDE and a GNOME live CD. This is the first of three test releases before the final version of Fedora 9 this April. The alpha features many changes including KDE 4 by default, GNOME 2.21.4, support for creation of encrypted partitions and for resizing EXT2/EXT3/NTFS partitions during install, speed improvements to X, the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, and much more."
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Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released More

Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released

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  • The OS of the FUTURE!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @03:39PM (#22310886)
    Fedora 9: Sulphur Alpha
    Isn't this a new show on the SciFi channel?
  • ...but can anyone give some good reasons as to why a Fedora 4,5,6,7 and 8 user might migrate to F9 instead of maybe waiting and checking out F10?

    I was checking out the F9 Features only last night and it didn't seem that there was a lot in there that had me salivating like F8 did. There was mention of Firefox 3 but I couldn't ascertain the status of it.

    It's a certain amount of trouble to do the upgrade (I usually do it as a new install), just wondering if it's worth it for me this time round.

    • Encrypted root support in anaconda. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ayanami Rei ( 621112 ) * <rayanami AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @04:16PM (#22311538) Journal
      That right there is the NUMBER ONE reason to get it if you have a laptop. It's been a long time coming and it is sorely missed.
      Now you too can reap the benefits of transparent encryption enforced at boot on your portable device, wrapped up in a package that is easy to set up.

      • suse10.2 - which has been out for eons - they're now on 10.3 - has had point and click encrypted partition creation... along with trivial creation of s/w raid (raid 0, 1 & 5)... so how come everyone else has taken so long to catch up.

        the advanced disk partitioning/formatting tool on suse is a real winner - even my developers (non-linux experts by far) could manage it; I tried ubuntu server only 4 months ago and it truly sucked golf balls through capillary tubes in the disk prep tools.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          It's been trivial to create encrypted partitions in Debian for quite some time. The option has been part of the installation process since Etch. Debian also has the big advantage that it's not Suse.
          • debian has the big advantage that you save lots of money not buying cutting edge hardware since it won't work on that :-P
        • It was getting the installer / boot scripts to support them (and also getting mkinitrd patched) so you can do encrypted root out of the box.

          There's little things about that you have to watch out for... for example, if you decide to use LVM and swap but use a dynamic generated key for encrypting swap, then you have to disable hibernation because resume won't work. Blah blah blah...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )
        If you wanted that so badly, why not go with one of the distros that's already delivered that in a release, like Ubuntu (alt cd) or Debian? Easiest setup I've seen in ages. Strangely enough, I haven't found any instructions on how to mount a *second* encrypted drive automagically using either same key or key from root, basicly one key to unlock the whole system. That should be a lot easier but certainly not easy or documented...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0racle ( 667029 )
      If I was a Fedora user, I'd be going to 9 for KDE 4.

    • Re:I know it's nice to be on the bleeding edge... (Score:5, Informative)

      by cbart387 ( 1192883 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @04:25PM (#22311684)
      For me the quicker starting/stopping of X sounds nice [64.233.169.104] (provided by google since Fedora's server is overloaded right now). An interest of mine is in Operations Research and I typically turn off X when running simulations to remove some of the variability. It'd be nice to have a quicker response from X. I'm not sure if that's on everyone's list though ...
    • ext4, and a much faster load time, perhaps?

  • Nomen est omen? (Score:1, Informative)

    by iuso ( 1145139 )
    "Sulphur" translates to the Finnish word "rikki", which incidentally also means "broken".

  • I realise I'm still very new to Linux, familiarising myself with Ubuntu Server and the desktop variants only recently, but 'sulphur'? The new improved Fedora: 'smells like rotting eggs'? Surely that's not the best name they could've come up with. Mind you, it's an Alpha release so maybe it's simply to prevent accidental downloads...

  • I wish they'd add a decent extent based filesystem to their install defaults. I'd love to have xfs in there by default and not have to install a separate module.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by businessnerd ( 1009815 )
      Generally, xfs and others like reiser are supported by default, but you have to "unlock" them at install time. To do this, when you first boot up the install disk, instead of just hitting Enter to launch that graphical installer (anaconda) you have to type in "linux xfs" or insert another fs of choice in the place of xfs. Not sure why they do this, but it is nice to know that it is available "out of the box".
  • phew! What's that smell?
  • Let me know when it will boot after install on one of these, otherwise I'll be sticking with Slack on my servers

    • Re:Compaq DL380 with Raid (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @06:29PM (#22313770) Homepage Journal
      Why would you use Fedora for a production server?
      Fedora has too short of a supported life for a server. I would recomend CentOS if you want a Red Hat like server install.

      • It depends on what you need.

        I'm running around 7 fedora servers performing various functions (web server, databases, svn etc.) and most of them started off with Fedora Core 1 and have done every update (not reinstall) to where they are now (f8).

        I've never had a major OS problem with any of them. I lose about an hour of uptime every 6 months to run the update to the latest version (after testing it on a devel server), and I combine this with some normal housekeeping I'd be doing anyway. I find that

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
          But what do you gain from using Fedora over CentOS?
          I am not saying that can not use Fedora and have a stable server but why choose it over CentOS?
          CentOS is just fine at running web servers, databases, and SVN. Most databases and Apache produce RPMs for Red Hat Enterpise very early in the update cycle so there is no need for you to not have the latest and greatest if you want. All the tools are pretty much the same for management so why Fedora over CentOS?
          I am long time Suse user but I have to admit that I h
      • RHEL 3 = red hat 9?
        RHEL 4 = fedora 3
        RHEL 5 = fedora 6
        RHEL 6 = fedora ?

        If I'm right, that last number will be a 9. If you install alpha now, you'll have all the latest stuff and a really long support life time.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
          But the latest stuff is not always the best stuff.

          The idea behind RHEL and CentOS and frankly Debian is to provide the most stable platform. For production servers uptime is everything. The ideal situation would be if you never had to update your server at all. That of course just doesn't happen. There will always be security fixes and bug fixes but many new features are just not that important.
          To give you a real world example. At my office we use a Postgres Database server to run our call queue. We have a

          • I think that Fedora 3 is no longer supported with updates, RHEL4 is.
            You seem to have missed the point entirely.
            All Fedora 3 packages work on RHEL4. RHEL4 packages work on Fedora 3.
            They are the same thing. RHEL4 is just an updated version of Fedora 3.
            If you installed Fedora 3, you can just set yum to update from RHEL4/CentOS4/ScientificLinux4 servers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rsax ( 603351 )
      As the other poster pointed out, make your life easier and install CentOS for servers instead of Fedora. I'm using CentOS 5.1 on Proliant DL360s and DL380s, G5 and older. All the HP monitoring software works as long as you modify the /etc/redhat-release file before installing.

  • I've been trying different Linux releases since 6 or 7, and I can't get anything to run stable on my VIA EPIA EN-15000G. Memtest86 will run for days with no errors. NetBSD (CURRENT) will run stable for as long as I've kept it up. Linux dies (just locks up hard: ping gets nothing, no response at the console) after a day or two at most, whether or not X is running. I'd _really_ prefer Linux for this box, since I wanted VMWare and to be able to consolidate a few boxes I use for various things. But I can't

    • I've been trying different Linux releases since 6 or 7

      Presumably you mean different Fedora releases since Fedora 6 or 7?

      You'll note that their target machine for X11 2d desktop performance [fedoraproject.org] is a 1.7GHz Pentium M with a Radeon 7500, which they say is "not fast and therefore a good target for tuning." I miss the days when you could expect- out of the box- to get good desktop performance on your 400MHz Pentium II and have a ~1.5GB install footprint (or less if you bothered deselecting stuff you didn't need on i

      • I do as a matter of fact, have a 400MHz PII and a ~1.5GB (maybe less than half of that) install footprint, but I'm using LFS. I get to choose the packages that I want. It takes about a day to compile everything (I made scripts to ease the tedium). For those who won't bother, a 5 MB Ubuntu Minimal CD would do, plus a fast connection. Should be just about the same.
      • Yeah, I've tried each new Fedora release (and some Suse and Ubuntu) when it comes out. Each one locks up hard. I don't care if it's fast, as it's a replacement for a Cobalt RaQ2+ 250MHz MIPS machine with no X11 installed...I just want it to run, be stable, and run VMWare.
      • > You'll note that their target machine for X11 2d desktop
        > performance is a ...

        Nope, the link merely notes that their reference machine for _testing_ an enhancement to X is a ...
    • w00t! I know this one. Had the same problem with my mainboards - the C7 processor is i586, not i686. Try the Ubuntu distros - they will work without any work. Gentoo, RedHat derivatives(Centos, RHEL, OEL) default to i686, which will cause all sorts of weirdness like hard crashes and reboots. If you want to get RH to work, you need to set it up with the correct kernel.

      (Got one of those $60 'google dev kit' mainboards, and was puzzled when gOS (a Ubuntu variant) booted fine, but Gentoo live distro did no

  • 9? Sulfur? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bmo ( 77928 ) on Wednesday February 06, 2008 @01:28AM (#22317606)
    I thought Fluorine was 9. Sulfur is 16, last I checked.

    --
    BMO

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