The system-config-soundcard utility has been removed, due to numerous legacy design and implementation issues. Modern technologies, including udev and the HAL, have made certain sound cards work out of the box. Any sound card not working out of the box should be reported as a bug. Preferences can still be fine-tuned within the desktop environment, using, among others, the PulseAudio tools.

Fedora 9 now includes Perl 5.10.0, the first "major" release update in perl5 in some time. The Perl interpreter itself is faster with a smaller memory footprint, and has several UTF-8 and threading improvements. The Perl installation is now relocatable, a blessing for systems administrators and operating system packagers. Perl 5.10.0 also adds a new smart match operator, a switch statement, named captures, state variables, and better error messages.

For more information, refer to:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html

The installonlyn plugin functionality has been folded into the core yum package. The installonlypkgs and installonly_limit options are used by default to limit the system to retain only two kernel packages. You can adjust the package set or the number of packages, or disable the option entirely to match your preferences. More details are available in the man page for yum.conf.

The yum command now retries when it detects a lock. This function is useful if a daemon is checking for updates, or if you are running yum and one of its graphical frontends simultaneously.

The yum command now understands a cost parameter in its configuration file, which is the relative cost of accessing a software repository. It is useful for weighing one software repository's packages as greater or less than any other. The cost parameter defaults to 1000, with lower costs given priority.

In Fedora 9 Rawhide, the /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo file has been changed to /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo. References to development in fedora-rawhide.repo have been changed to rawhide. Due to the way that RPM deals with configuration files, the existing /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo file is saved as /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo.rpmsave if it was previous modified. Users of the development repository may need to update scripts custom configuration files to use the new name.

The pam_mount facility now uses a configuration file written in XML. The /etc/security/pam_mount.conf file will be converted to /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml during update with /usr/bin/convert_pam_mount_conf.pl, which removes all comments. Any per-user configuration files must be converted manually, with the conversion script if desired. A sample pam_mount.conf.xml file with detailed comments about the available options appears at /usr/share/doc/pam_mount-*/pam_mount.conf.xml.

TeXLive is a replacement for the old, unmaintained TeX package. It offers new style packages and fixes many security problems with the old distribution.

The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) has been included directly into Fedora 9. Work is ongoing. For the latest news and documentation, refer to:

http://k12linux.fedorahosted.org/

The nautilus-open-terminal package now uses a GConf key to control its behavior when launched by right-clicking the Desktop. To enable its previous behavior, which opens the resulting terminal in the user's home directory, use this command:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/nautilus-open-terminal/desktop_opens_home_dir --type=bool true

The i810switch package has been removed. This functionality is now available through the xrandr command in the xorg-x11-server-utils package.

The evolution-exchange package replaces evolution-connector , and provides a capability under the old name.

The system-config-firewall and system-config-selinux packages replace system-config-security-level . The system-config-selinux package is part of the policycoreutils-gui package.

The pilot-link package now blacklists the visor module by default. Users are encouraged to try the direct USB access present in recent versions of pilot-link. This is enabled by passing the --port usb: option to the various pilot-link tools, instead of the serial devices used in the past (typically /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, and so forth). For example:

pilot-xfer --port usb: --list

The hal-info and hal packages have been updated to correctly set permissions for the necessary USB devices using PolicyKit. If you have any existing manual configurations, revert the changes to avoid possible conflicts.

For further information, refer to the README.fedora included in the pilot-link package.

The following legal information concerns some software in Fedora.

Portions Copyright (c) 2002-2007 Charlie Poole or Copyright (c) 2002-2004 James W. Newkirk, Michael C. Two, Alexei A. Vorontsov or Copyright (c) 2000-2002 Philip A. Craig