Fedora 9 "Sulphur" Alpha Released

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."

Re:

[1_brown_mouse]

I have had no problems with wireless using the ndiswrapper.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

The switch on the side of my laptop that turns it on and off has caused me more grief for a while than any driver issue.

Re:

[blueg3]

Depends on what you mean. Will they start providing closed-source or otherwise IP-encumbered drivers? No.

The OS of the FUTURE!!!

[gEvil (beta)]

Fedora 9: Sulphur Alpha
Isn't this a new show on the SciFi channel?

I know it's nice to be on the bleeding edge...

[thewils]

...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.

[Ayanami Rei]

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.

Re:

[speculatrix]

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:

[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.

Re:

[speculatrix]

debian has the big advantage that you save lots of money not buying cutting edge hardware since it won't work on that :-P

Creating them after the fact is easy in any distro

[Ayanami Rei]

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:

[Kjella]

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...

Because some of us don't like Ubuntu?

[Ayanami Rei]

It's not the environment is bad, I just don't like rolling APT packages. I was okay with hand-rolling patched mkinitrd's for the last few years but anaconda support here is like delicious gravy to me.

Re:

[0racle]

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...

[cbart387]

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 ...

Re:

[BrianGKUAC]

ext4, and a much faster load time, perhaps?

Nomen est omen?

[iuso]

"Sulphur" translates to the Finnish word "rikki", which incidentally also means "broken".

it smells like sulphur

[Reverend528]

of course, that's a sign that there are lots of daemons.

Is this a deliberate naming convention?

[ricebowl]

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...

Re:

[NaCh0]

Mind you, it's an Alpha release so maybe it's simply to prevent accidental downloads...

Bingo!

Re:

[rudlavibizon]

Sulfur doesn't smell like rotten eggs, hydrogen-sulfide [wikipedia.org] does

Re:

[MonsterTrimble]

Sulphur: Sounds cool, smells bad.

Assume marketing had a hand in it.

Re:

[billius]

Indeed, Fedora Brimstone would have been a much more metal name...

filesystems

[blackjackshellac]

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:

[businessnerd]

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".

Re:

[ThePhilips]

RH never made a secret that Fedora is essentially a test bed for their commercial offering RHEL.

It would sound like rants, yet, the only people I know using Fedora are using it "unwillingly:" because their companies run RHEL, because their partners are using RHEL, because they need need to be compatible to RHEL, etc. I know nobody who uses Fedora because s/he likes it.

Fedora isn't bad at all. Yet, rough edges of corporate leadership are sticking out all over the place.

Re:

[idontgno]

would sound like rants, yet, the only people I know using Fedora are using it "unwillingly:" because their companies run RHEL, because their partners are using RHEL, because they need need to be compatible to RHEL, etc. I know nobody who uses Fedora because s/he likes it.

So why aren't they running CentOS? [centos.org] It is RHEL without the trademarks and the promises-on-paper you don't get anyways if you're running Fedora, and as far as my experience goes it's production-grade. You're not RH's guinea pig like you'd b

Re:

[zrq]

I know nobody who uses Fedora because s/he likes it.

I use Fedora on all my machines, servers, desktops and laptops, and like it a lot.

Glad to make your acquaintance, now you know at least one person who uses Fedora because they like it.

Whew

[macdaddy]

phew! What's that smell?

Compaq DL380 with Raid

[Pop69]

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

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:

[J.Y.Kelly]

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:

[LWATCDR]

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

Re:

[LWATCDR]

I know this is a bit of a radical statment but Linux is Linux.
I don't find it all that hard to jump from Ubuntu, to OpenSuse, to CentOS.
Okay yum is a little different than apt-get and both are a little different from Yast but they are just not that hard to move from.
The difference between Fedora and CentOS are so small that I just don't see the problem but then I like learning new stuff and I am an old fart.

Longest lifetime?

[Kludge]

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:

[LWATCDR]

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

You are missing the point

[Kludge]

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:

[rsax]

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 wonder if it'll work on my hardware...

[rthille]

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

That's way below what they expect to perform well.

[jensend]

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

Re:That's way below what they expect to perform we

[owlman17]

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.

Re:That's way below what they expect to perform we

[rthille]

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.

Re:

[sonamchauhan]

> 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 ...

Re:

[(H)elix1]

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

Re:

[rthille]

I'm not in front of the machine right now (and it's powered down), but I don't think that's it. I'm pretty sure I tired Ubuntu, at least once, and according to this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Epia_CN10000 [gentoo-wiki.com] the C7 is an i686. So does this: http://tinyurl.com/2pmpwy [tinyurl.com] but it seems to indicate that a C3 (the previous VIA processor rev) wasn't an i686.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone know where the torrent can be found?

Here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease [fedoraproject.org]

9? Sulfur?

[bmo]

I thought Fluorine was 9. Sulfur is 16, last I checked.

--
BMO