Fedora 9 Released!!!

And it rocks!!

The first thing you notice after fedora 9 is the blazing faaaast startup and shutdown times.

Now, before I say anything else about Fedora 9, here are a few screenshots :

Here’s Gnome  in F9 :

And here is KDE 4 (finally !!):

KDE 4 seems to be following the footsteps of some of its latest applications like Basket. The new start menu now acts like that of IPOD. And the inbuilt search as shown in the following video is simply amazing!. The whole desktop has been given a major revamp. And so has been the theme. The widgets on the desktop now act a bit like widgets on Vista.

Among the key features, the feature that i think will prove to be indispensable later in making fedora more famous is the windows fedora live usb creator.

A feature (a release method actually) that really helped me a lot in creating the live DVD is Jigdo. Here is what the official release notes say about Jigdo :

Fedora releases are also available via Jigdo. This distribution method can improve the speed of obtaining the installation ISO images. Instead of waiting for torrent downloads to complete, Jigdo seeks the fastest mirrors it can find via the Fedora Project Mirror Manager infrastructure, and downloads the bits it needs from these mirrors. To optimize seeking these bits, you can tell Jigdo to scan a DVD or CD you already have, and cut down on redundant downloads. This feature becomes particularly useful if you:

1. Download all the test releases and then get the final release, in which case you have 90% of the data already with each subsequent download.

2. Download both the DVD and the CD set, in which case the DVD holds 95% of the data needed for the CD sets.

3. Download any combination of the above.

Anaconda, the installer for fedora, now supports resizing of ntfs, ext3 and ext4 partitions during installation. This will be of great help to windows users. (yes, it supports ext4 now.) Also, it gives an option of installing encrypted partitions. Business users ought to try this, but with caution.
Here is a list of all the new features in fedora 9.