First Look at Fedora 9 Preview

I’VE spent a few of days in the company of Fedora 9 Preview and my first impressions are very favourable.
Installed into an 8GB Virtualbox virtual machine, it’s a snappy release with a high degree of consistency and stability throughout.
A lot of the hard work has been done on background stuff – those items mentioned in my ‘Big Stuff’ list below.
But that’s not to ignore the importance of visual appeal, where Fedora 9 scores very highly too.
Anyway, here’s my early impressions and a few screenshots to whet your appetites.

The Big Stuff
Let’s start at the beginning, with the installation.
Anaconda, the Fedora installer, has always been one of my favourites – it’s simple to use, even for beginners, is polished and highly professional.In F9 it has been improved: It now has the ability to resize Ext 2, Ext 3 and NTFS partitions; there’s support for dealing with encrypted partitions; hardware probing is dealt with by HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and udev rather than kudzu; and there’s now support for persistence if you’re installing on a USB flash drive.
PackageKit has been introduced: This is a new graphical/console tool for cross-distribution software management and is installed by default.
The PackageKit graphical updater replaces Pup and behind-the-scenes YUM has been tweaked for more efficient performance, while Pup and Pirut remain available on the repository.
System updates have been waiting for me on all my post-install reboots, further enhancing the Fedora reputation for rapid-fire upgrade cycles.Compiz is installed by default and Compiz-Fusion, marrying Compiz with Beryl, is in the repository. If you’ve got the required 3D graphics drivers installed, enabling a 3D desktop is simple via the “Desktop Effects” panel.
Work has been done to improve Network Manager, notably through support for more mobile devices and mobile broadband support.

The GNOME and Small Stuff

GNOME 2.22 comes with a new world clock applet that displays the time and weather conditions for multiple time zones simultaneously.
This new feature was created by the Fedora community itself, and contributed upstream.
There’s also a new GNOME Display Manager by default, which includes the ability to take advantage of power management at the login screen and the ability to dynamically configure displays.The Fedora team promise improvements in the way F9 handles Bluetooth devices, though as I was running F9 in a virtual machine I was unable to test this.
On the Multimedia front it’s business as usual for one of the strictest of FOSS distributions – ie. not a proprietary codec anywhere in sight.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 web browser is included by default, with a native look and desktop integration.
Thanks to swfdec changing to a GStreamer backend, Fedora have been able to include a FOSS browser plugin capable of playing Flash content like videos, animation and games, but you’ll still need to make a decision about various multimedia codecs to get full use out of it.
What might seem like a small feature is actually very useful: Consolidated Dictionary Support.
For some time, several Fedora applications, including OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, GNOME and KDE, have each had their own set of dictionaries.
This problem is now fixed by consolidating all the dictionaries.
Aesthetics have been well catered for in F9.
DejaVu full replaces DejaVu LGC as the default font set, while the Luxi font has been dropped since its license does not allow modifications.
DejaVu and Liberation have both been updated to new versions with more coverage.The general look and feel of F9 is actually very nice, with a tasteful, stylish default desktop wallpaper and well co-ordinated Nodoko window borders and controls.

I'm sure there's a lot in the forthcoming full release of Fedora 9 for both new and experienced Linux users alike though, as always, the distribution's leaders' aversion to anything proprietary is an obvious obstacle for those completely new to Linux and Open Source.
Nonetheless, there's a lot here to commend them on and I, for one, can't wait to give the full release a try when it hits the mirrors in a few weeks' time.
Good job guys.