Red Hat Previews Fedora 9 Development Linux

Published: April 29, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you like to be out there on the bleeding edge of the Linux operating system, then Red Hat has a preview of an upcoming Fedora Development release, Version 9 to be precise and code-named "Sulphur" if you play Code Name Bingo, that it would love for you to take out for a spin. The Fedora Project is, of course, where the developers who create what ultimately becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux take their first stabs at integrating new Linux kernels, additional systems software, and applications into a whole.

Fedora 8 is the currently available development release, which got underway in April 2007 and which was launched last November. A lot of the code that was hammered out in that Fedora 8 development release is winding its way toward Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which is now in beta and is based on the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. (You can read about that RHEL 5.2 beta in this story and all about Fedora 8 in this story.)

As you might expect, Fedora 9 is based on a more recent kernel, Linux 2.6.25 to be specific, and it includes a lot of tweaks to make server and desktop virtualization more integrated with the system and more transparent to the user. For one thing, the Fedora project has replaced the forward-ported kernel-xen implementation of the Xen hypervisor with the paravirt_ops implementation. Fully virtualized guests are also able to boot a kernel and initrd image and pass boot arguments, too. Fedora 9 also includes the KDE 4 graphical user interface as an option, plus updates to the gcc compilers, X Server, Firefox, Perl, and OpenOffice; the software also will sport the ext4 file system and an add-in to provide native encryption in file systems. You can see the full release summary for the preview at this link.

Remember, the Fedora 9 preview is just that--a preview--and is not even to be considered beta code yet and hence is not appropriate for anything close to production environments. However, in the announcement posted by Jesse Keating, one of the Fedora Project managers, the Fedora 9 preview is "fairly close to what the final product will be like," and he stresses that it is important for members of the Fedora community to give it a whirl before the software is released formally on May 13. At the moment, the Fedora 9 preview is available as a BitTorrent download (which you can access here for LiveCD images for Gnome and KDE plus regular CD and DVD images; this week, the software will be available through the Web mirroring system that the Fedora Project uses.

The Fedora Project expects to get a limited Fedora 9 Release Candidate 1 out the door on May 1 for some final testing before the final release hits on May 13.

While Fedora is a lot of things, what it is not is an attempt by Red Hat to take on Microsoft on the desktop with a commercialized variant of Linux aimed at personal and corporate desktops and laptops. Just in case anyone gets the idea that Red Hat is looking to go after this space, the company put out a statement quashing the idea. "We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future," the company's statement reads. "As a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers."

Red Hat has been encouraged to offer tech support for Fedora, as it does for Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, but it is probably the case that the potentially millions of newbie Linux users who would consume Red Hat's tech support resources would require the company to charge as much for Fedora as it does for Red Hat Enterprise Desktop--and I would venture a guess that, given the lack of Linux knowledge among consumers, even more. Other than the bulk Linux customers who want Red Hat Global Desktop--mostly in emerging markets and supported by resellers, not Red Hat--customers are basically being told to use Red Hat Enterprise Desktop or stick with Windows.

Still, Red Hat can't help but get a dig in. This week, the company announced that the Gates Center, the computer science facility that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded with a $50 million endowment to propel computer science research, is planning on installing Fedora on at least some of its machines. Of course, as a hotbed of Unix research, you can expect a lot of Unix as well as Windows in the Gates Center.

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