First the good news. Fedora 9 Preview is now out -- woohoo!

The bad news? Well since Fedora 9 Preview is out a little late, Red Hat has now pushed back the official release date of Fedora 9 by two weeks. The original release date for Fedora 9 was set for April 29th, the new date is now May 13th.

According to Fedora Release Manager Jesse Keating:

The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the final spit-and-polish.  There needs to be sufficient time between the PR and the release for testers to find and report issues.

In the grand scheme of things, two weeks isn't really a big deal at all. Especially since the extra two weeks are really all about testing. Fedora 9 is an important release for both Red Hat and the Fedora community in that it will introduce several new innovations to the Linux distribution.

Key among those innovations is FreeIPA, which is a tool for system administrators to install, set up and administer centralized identity management and authentication. The new PackageKit system that I wrote about at the time of the Fedora 9 Beta last month is also very interesting.Fedora 9 will also be the first Fedora release that will provide full support for the KDE 4 Linux desktop.

Fedora currently claims that there are now 2 million unique installations of Fedora 8 which was released back in November of 2007.