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.

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 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.