Releases/9/Beta/ReleaseNotes

= Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Beta Release Notes =

What is Fedora?
Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and guided by contributors. These projects are developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards. The center piece of the Fedora project is an operating system (Fedora Collection) that is released twice a year, and is based on the Linux kernel, that is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.

Before each release, there are three development releases made available, and each one has a different intended audience:
 * 1) The Alpha release is aimed at developers. It contains many bleeding-edge packages and is definitely not recommended for production machines.
 * 2) The Beta release is aimed at early adopters, and at this point in the development cycle most things should work and all new features should be in a testable form. Although still not recommended for production machines, by trying this release users can provide crucial feedback that will help ensure the final release is as good as possible.
 * 3) The Preview release is for users and contributors in the free software community. This release signals the point when we need full participation from the community, with plenty of feedback, as only through lots of use will we find all those hard to spot bugs that need fixing before release.

To find out more information about Fedora, refer to the following Web pages:


 * Fedora Overview
 * Fedora FAQ
 * Help and Support
 * Join Fedora!

Official Announcement
You can find the official release announcement at this url:
 * 

What Is The Beta Release?
The Beta release represents a snapshot of Rawhide, the development branch of the Fedora Collection, and signals the feature freeze. This means that all major features must be complete or in a testable state, and so the Beta release provides a good indication of what users can expect from the final release. It is aimed primarily at developers and early-adopters, but less experienced users who are interested in helping with testing are encouraged to do so with the live media (bootable CDs, DVDs or USB sticks).

How To Try Beta
Thanks to the infrastructure that was developed during the Fedora 7 release cycle, this Beta release is accompanied by live media images (for CDs, DVDs or USB sticks) of the GNOME and KDE desktops. These live images make testing possible without installing any software on an existing system. As the Beta release is the time when we need plenty of input and testing from the community, this method is an extremely easy and effective way for anybody to get involved with testing the next Fedora release.

The Beta release is available through the following download methods:
 * (recommended) BitTorrent, an efficient and easy distributed file-sharing system
 * Jigdo, an alternative system that reduces download size in some situations, or for people who can't use BitTorrent
 * direct download from a mirror location near you

To download, visit:
 * 

Remember that live images can be used on USB media via the 'livecd-iso-to-disk' utility available in the livecd-tools package on existing Fedora systems; Refer to this  page  for more instructions.

Providing Feedback
As mentioned above, the Beta release provides an opportunity for the wider community to begin testing the next release of Fedora. You can help the Fedora Project continue to improve Fedora if you file bug reports and enhancement requests. These links will explain what needs testing for the Beta release and allow you to submit your feedback:


 * Bugzilla Bug Reports

Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Release Schedule And Feature Details
Development continues on Rawhide after the Beta release, ensuring that all the features that have made it this far and stable for the Release Candidate and final release. The links below provide the release schedule for both the pre-releases and the final release, as well as the wiki pages for the various features planned for inclusion in Fedora 9 where their progress can be tracked.


 * Feature List
 * Schedule

Release Overview
As always/ Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 9, please see their individual wiki pages which detail their goals and progress. Also, throughout the release cycle there will be interviews with the developers behind key features, so keep an eye on these to get the inside scoop.

GNOME Desktop 2.22 Release
GNOME 2.22 brings many improvements, not least of which is the introduction of GVFS and GIO as a replacement for GNOME VFS by Fedora developer and nautilus maintainer AlexanderLarsson. GVFS introduces many benefits including performance improvements, queuing multiple file transfers, and security enhancements via PolicyKit, which is developed and maintained by Fedora developer DavidZeuthen, and was first introduced in Fedora 8.

GNOME 2.22 also comes with a new world clock applet that displays the time and weather conditions for multiple time zones simultaneously.



Also exciting on the GNOME front is the inclusion of the new GNOME Display Manager by default. It is a significant change from the previous GDM, enabling many new and exciting features. These features include the ability to take advantage of power management at the login screen, the ability to dynamically configure displays, potential improvements for "hot-seating," and better integration with Policy Manager has made managing your network devices easy in Fedora. With this release, our developers are aiming to expand the situations in which Network Manager with Policy as opposed to the previous ,   and. The netinst.iso image contains the kernel, initrd and image used for installation - everything the user needs to install a system over the network.
 * Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions. Watch a screencast.
 * Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
 * Increased separation of the installer second stage and the packages being installed
 * Allow the user to set the install source during the second stage of installation
 * Use libblkid for filesystem probing
 * Experimental support for installing to ext4 filesystems if you install with  as a boot option
 * Support for native installation to x86_64 machines using EFI and booting via grub
 * Completely overhauled hardware probing and detection based on udev and HAL rather than kudzu

Live Image Improvements
Work has continued to better integrate the live images with the rest of the system and improve the tools used for building them. livecd-creator now also provides an API which can be used for building alternative front-ends as well as for building tools for other types of images.

The initial work to support persistent changes with a live image have also landed. The primary usage of this feature is booting a USB stick with your live image as well as the persistent changes. To do this, take the live image and you can run the following command: where 512 is the desired size (in megabytes) of the overlay. You can find the livecd-iso-to-disk shell script in the LiveOS directory at the top-level of the CD image. Note that you'll need to have space on your USB stick for the live image plus your overlay plus any other data you want on the stick.

Upstart Init Daemon
Fedora 9 uses the Upstart init daemon as a replacement for System V init. The benefit of this is that Upstart has a more sophisticated idea of how to to trigger and manage services. For Fedora this is particularly useful as it will help us to improve our boot and shutdown processes, streamlining a lot of what currently happens.

All current init scripts should run without errors. However, any customizations to  will need to be ported to upstart. For information on how to do so, please see the Upstart Getting Started Guide.

There are some known issues with upstart at this point that beta testers should be aware of, including:
 * Details mode in RHGB is not working
 * Automatic serial console configuration is not working

For Fedora package maintainers, it is not recommended to move System V init scripts to native Upstart events at this time.

FreeIPA
Free RADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution.

PackageKit
Package Kit makes use of some of the latest technologies such as Policy facility now uses a configuration file written in XML. The  file will be converted to   during update with , which removes all comments. Any per-user configuration files must be converted manually, with the conversion script if desired. A sample  file with detailed comments about the available options appears at.