09
Fedora 9 Finally
by admin ·
My main system is finally running Fedora 9 (referred to as F9 from here on), admittedly I thought this day might not come. I normally switch to the latest Fedora version within a month of its release, which has been the case since Fedora(Core)4, the first version I used as a desktop OS. This wasn’t possible for me with F9 for a number of reasons.
At release, F9 was unusable (for my needs), and even a month later, it was still to under developed to deploy as my regular desktop OS. I think it’s fair to say F9 is the first “alpha” release since FC1, and a step backwards when measured against previous versions. With such a negative view of F9, one might ask why am I running it now? The answer has multiple parts.
The first is, I can’t run F8 forever, no matter how well it runs currently, and it does run well. With the EOL (end of life) about 3 months away, now seemed as good a time as any to start looking ahead.
Second, F9 is finally mature enough that I can confidently deploy it, knowing it’s going to do what I need in a daily OS.
And lastly, none of this will likely matter, in 2 1/2 to 3 months F10 will be released and the cycle can start anew.
I can say everything is working quite well so far, and I don’t see any major problems ahead, though again it may not matter.
A firm suggestion to anyone thinking of installing F9, download the community re-spin, it will save you a lot of headache. A re-spin is a repackaging of the release with the latest updates available at the time of the re-spin. I found that many things are broken “out of the box” in the originally released installion media making updates almost a 1GB of downloading for me. The re-spin although weighing in at 3.6 gigs, is worth the time to download.
Tags: Fedora 9, linux installation