Fedora 9 Sulphur finally released !

Fedora 9 Sulphur was officially released today. The net is abuzz with the news, so I am not going to repeat them here. I actually had the chance to experience the full Fedora 9 release a few days earlier, thanks to a misconfigured update server in Europe. For about a month, I have been using Fedora 9 RC as my main OS and I am loving it. It's one of the best releases ever in Fedora history. So give it a try, you won't regret it.
Release notes: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/
Download: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

Guide to Fedora 9 (Preview Release)

I was intending to stick to Fedora 8 until Sulphur final version was officially released, but a freak partition table corruption resulted in me having to reformat the whole hard drive. So then I decided to go with Fedora 9 Preview release and needless to say, I am pretty impressed with what I have seen. I have installed every Fedora release since Fedora Core 4, and Fedora 9 is the most seamless and hassle free setup I have experienced so far. Most of the things work out of the box without the need for any configuration. But here are a few of the settings and related pitfalls from my experience.

Repositories
The default yum repository is Fedora-rawhide and most of the tools required for general use can be found in it. But for those of us who need to install additional and non 'free' stuff, the best option is to enable the livna repositories. The caveat here is that there's no official livna repo for Fedora 9 yet, so we have to make do with the livna-development repo for now.

wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
rpm -ivh livna-release-8.rpm

Once the repo is installed, open /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo and set enabled=1 to enabled=0. Then open /etc/yum.repos.d/livna-development.repo and set enabled=0 to enabled=1. That's it, livna is up and running now !.


ATI Display Driver
Unfortunately, the ATI proprietary drivers have a problem with the new kernel in Fedora 9 and won't install at all. kmod-fglrx from the livna repo also didn't work on my machine. Apparently it's still a work in progress. So for now, I have to live with the default radeon drivers installed by Fedora setup. It's not too bad however, and so far I didn't really miss the ATI drivers except when I tried to enable compiz. But I suppose I can survive without compiz for a couple of weeks.

Metacity Compositing Manager
Gnome 2.22 has simple composite effects built in. So if compiz is too resource intensive, give the new Gnome effects a try. The effects are very low key, such as previews in Alt+tab window switching and minimize animations. To enable the effects, run the following command:
gconftool-2 -s --type bool /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true Substitute false for true if you want to disable the effects.


Media Playback
Fedora doesn't come with any of the proprietary codecs for media playback. To enable mp3 and other codecs, do the following. (Make sure livna repo is enabled)
sudo yum install xine-lib-extras-nonfree gstreamer*
Most of the audio and video formats should be playable now. I recommend vlc for video playback and audacious for audio.
sudo yum install vlc audacious audacious-plugins*

Flash Audio in Firefox 3b5
If there is no sound while playing flash videos in Firefox (Youtube, GoogleVideo etc.) you need to install libflashsupport. I couldn't find it in the rawhide or livna repositories, but I found it in the install DVD. So first, setup the install DVD as a repository. The default mount point of the DVD has spaces, which seems to confuse yum. Therefore, I mounted the DVD manually.
sudo umount /media/Fedora\ 9-Preview\ i386\ DVD/
sudo mkdir /mnt/cd
sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cd
Then copy media.repo to yum.repos.d
sudo cp /mnt/cd/media.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/media.repo
Edit media.repo and add the following line
baseurl=file:///mnt/cd/
The full contents of the file will be as follows:
[InstallMedia]
name=Fedora 9-Preview
mediaid=1208448886.504557
metadata_expire=-1
gpgcheck=0
baseurl=file:///mnt/cd/
cost=500

Now that we have the repo enabled. Install libflashsupport
sudo yum install libflashsupport
If Firefox is running, exit and restart Firefox again. Go to Youtube and play a video. You should hear the sounds now.

To be continued...

Fedora 9 Sulphur Beta Live CD - A first look

Fedora 9 codenamed Sulphur will release in 20 more days. Keeping to the Fedora Project's tradition of being on the bleeding edge of technology, the new release is chock-full of the latest and greatest software releases. Some of the touted new features include:

• KDE 4.0.2
  
• Gnome 2.22
  
• Firefox 3b5 with integrated look & feel
• Packagekit for cross-platform package management
• Improved NetworkManager
• ext4 file system

Check out the full release notes at http://fedoraproject.org/f9-beta-relnotes

Unable to contain my excitement, I decided to download the live CD (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease) and give it a spin (pun intended). Due to the proprietary nature of my laptop, all the live CD's I have tried so far ( Ubuntu Gutsy, Ubuntu Hardy Alpha, Backtrack3, Fedora Werewolf, Linux Gamers Live) never worked as intended. The only exception is Sabayon, which comes with ATI drivers pre-loaded. I realize that it's not possible to bundle proprietary drivers with the distros, but what I never understood was why they didn't default back to VGA settings and at least run a puny desktop.

Anyway, getting back to the topic, Sulphur live CD was a pleasant surprise as it correctly identified my display driver without any intervention. So for the first time since Sabayon, I was able to directly log on to a GUI without having to meddle with xorg.conf and ATI drivers. The artwork has not changed since Fedora 8. The boot screens and the logon screens all have the same design as Fedora 8. If the past is any indication, I would expect the final release to have newer and snazzier artwork. But for the time being, Sulphur is almost identical to it's older sibling.

Eversince FC6, Wireless connections in Fedora has been a pet peeve of mine. Until few months ago, to connect to my wirless network, I always had to run my own script. NetworkManager never ever seemed to work for me. It was the same for Fedora 8, until a couple of months ago; when I finally managed to tame NetworkManager. Fedora 9 Beta exceeded my expectations when it connected to my wireless network without a hitch ! If the live CD was a girl, I swear I would have married it right then !! :)

The new version of Gnome is working as expected. There are no obvious differences when compared to Gnome 2.20, but I really love the new world clock. Nautilus seems more responsive than usual, even though I am running off a CD. I didn't try to enable the built-in compositing manager, because the default display driver doesn't support direct rendering and frame buffers. All in all, my first impression of Gnome 2.22 is a very good one.

Firefox has never looked this nice ! It's truly a great step forward to have full system integration. Earlier, Firefox was the odd man out as it never followed the system settings. I had to tweak Firefox for hours before it looked decent in Fedora 8, but even then the pages never looked right and fonts always got screwed up. In Fedora 9, Firefox is fully integrated with the system and everything looks great ! Kudos to everyone involved in getting Fedora and Firefox together.

Testing ext4 and NTFS resizing will have to wait until I finally install Fedora 9. But so far from what I have seen, Fedora 9 is going to be one of the best releases in the history of the Fedora project. This is not to say that all previous releases of Fedora were crap. But unlike the users of other distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora users always had to pay a price for being on the bleeding edge. Things always didn't work together and required a lot of tweaking. This is probably what keeps many novice users away from Fedora. However now, Fedora is at least stable enough to go mainstream. Hopefully it will open the eyes of all those Ubuntu fanatics who think that Ubuntu is the only Linux distro in the world.