Fedora 9 Alpha Has Been Released

Fedora 9 Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

This new release features Linux kernel 2.6.24, support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions in the Anaconda installer, faster X window system; GNOME 2.21 with GVFS and GIO as a replacement for GNOME VFS, KDE 4.0 as the default KDE with compatibility packages to ensure applications not yet ported to KDE 4 will continue to work, Firefox 3 Beta 2 with desktop integration, the new Places replacement for bookmarks and a re-worked address bar, PackageKit - a cross-distribution package management solution with a complete yum backend, and a number of other improvements.

Fedora 9 Alpha Highlights:

• GNOME 2.21 Development Release
• KDE 4.0
• Firefox 3 Beta 2
• Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install
• Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
• PackageKit
• Kernel 2.6.24
• And numerous other improvements and enhancements.

More info can be reached on its release notes, and links for download can be found by visiting here.