A funny thing happened on the way into the office today, an Alpha release of Fedora 9 happened!

The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an
opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

Some highlights of Fedora 9 Alpha:

* GNOME 2.21 Development Release
* KDE 4.0
* Firefox 3 Beta 2
* Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install
* Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
* PackageKit
* Kernel 2.6.24

And numerous other improvements and enhancements.