As a Fedora fan, I am eagerly waiting for the F9 release, but now Fedora Wiki says that F9 release is delayed by two weeks (F9 final release on May 13).

I am very much interested in the following features in F9

• Ext4
• Firefox 3
• Fast XStartup
• KDE4
• NetworkManager with Mobile Broadband support

I assume it means that I can use NetworkManager to connect to my Airtel GPRS network without much hassles.

I am personally not happy with NetworkManager in F8. I was happy with knetworkmanager, but from F8 I think even KDE uses Gnome NetworkManager. Connecting to encrypted wirelesss network from NetworkManager is a pain, particulary if you do suspend to RAM/Disk. knetworkmanager used to work as a charm. So when connecting to wireless I usually stop NetworkManager and use scripts to connect to wireless access points. This method works always for me.

I expect KDE4 in F9 will use knetworkmanager(with mobile phone ppp feature) instead of gnome NetworkManager.

I observed another bad thing in Fedora is that even if you don’t select gnome desktop, some of gnome desktop packages are installed. Its not possible to do only KDE install in Fedora. I wish if F9 could do a KDE alone spin.