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Fedora Core

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Fedora Core is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat. The name derives from Red Hat's characteristic fedora used in its "Shadowman" logo. However, the Fedora community project had existed as a volunteer group providing extra software for the Red Hat Linux distribution before Red Hat got involved as a direct sponsor.http://web.archive.org/web/20030219051938/www.fedora.us/fedora.html

Fedora aims to be a complete, general-purpose operating system from open source software. Fedora is designed to be easily installed and configured with a simple graphical installer and the 'system-config' suite of configuration tools. Packages and their dependencies can be easily downloaded and installed with the yum utility. New releases of Fedora come out every six to eight months.

The name Fedora Core distinguishes the main Fedora packages from those of the Fedora Extras project, which provides add-ons to Fedora Core.

Fedora was derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution. The project envisages that conventional Linux home users will use Fedora Core, and intends that it replace the consumer distributions of Red Hat Linux. Support for Fedora comes from the greater community (although Red Hat staff work on it, Red Hat does not provide official support for Fedora).

Fedora is sometimes called Fedora Linux, though this is not actually the official name.

Contents

Features

Versions

Fedora Core 4
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Fedora Core 4

Stable

On March 20, 2006, Fedora Core 5 (FC5, release name Bordeaux) was released. It includes GNOME 2.14, KDE 3.5.1, Xorg 7.0, GCC 4.1, version 2.6.16 of the Linux kernel, and, for the first time, the Mono development platform. Mono has not been included until now due to an unclear state of software patents of Microsoft.

Fedora Core 4 (FC4, release name Stentz), the previous stable version, was released on June 13, 2005 for the i386, AMD64, and PowerPC architectures. It includes GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4, GCC 4.0, a gcj-compiled version of the Eclipse IDE, and version 2.6.11 of the Linux kernel.

Unstable

Fedora Core 6 Test 1 is the current unstable release of Fedora Core. Fedora Core 6 Final will be the next stable release of Fedora Core, which will be released in October 2006.

The preliminary release schedule of Fedora Core 6 is shown as follows:

Bleeding-edge

Development versions of distributions such as Red Hat are often referred to as the "bleeding edge" http://lwn.net/1998/0820/rawhide.html. In Red Hat and Fedora, this refers to the repositories known as Rawhide. New packages that end up in Fedora (and later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) are first added to Fedora Rawhide. Rawhide is in perpetual beta, and may break at any time, but some developers do use it as their main distribution.

Maintained by Fedora Legacy

The Fedora Legacy project is a community project that handles releases after Red Hat has stopped maintaining updates for those who do not wish to or cannot upgrade.

Fedora Core 3
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Fedora Core 3

Fedora Core 3 (FC3, release name Heidelberg) was released on November 8, 2004 for the i386 and AMD64 architectures, and was transferred to Fedora Legacy on January 16, 2006. It included GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3.0, X.Org Server 6.8.1, the Xen virtualizer, and version 2.6.9 of the Linux kernel.

Fedora Core 2 (FC2, release name Tettnang) reached release on May 18, 2004, and was transferred to Fedora Legacy on April 11, 2005. It included version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2.1, and SELinux. This version also replaced XFree86 with the X.Org Server. This release occasioned many complaints because of its problems with installation while dual-booting with Windows XP (actually caused by an issue with the 2.6 kernel's handling of partitions).

Fedora Core 1 (FC1, internal codename Cambridge, release name Yarrow) was released on November 6, 2003, and transferred to Fedora Legacy on November 20, 2004. Improvements over Red Hat Linux 9 included automated updates with yum, improved laptop support with ACPI and cpufreq, and prelinking for faster program start time. An AMD64 version appeared in March 2004.

Repositories of extra software

Fedora Core only includes a core set of packages. For downloading and installing programs or codecs not distributed with Core, there are several repositories available. Packages are generally compatible between third-party repositories, though this has not always been the case.[FreshRPMs mailing list: (non-)compatibility of repositories] There are also occasional overlaps or packaging errors that cause one package to negatively affect packages distributed from different repositories.

Official repositories

Currently only Fedora Extras has the status of official. This repository supports the currently released version of Fedora Core 5. All the others should be compatible with it.

Fedora Extras is maintained by a group of volunteers and affiliated with the official Fedora Project. As a link to Extra is currently included in the base distribution, no extra configuration is required to enable it.

Unofficial Repositories

These repositories are designed to be compatible with Fedora Core although they may not be compatible with each other. Some of the repositories have discontinued active support for earlier versions of Fedora Core but keep the repositories around for the convenience of users with previous versions.

(Must use with Extras. Not compatible with RPMForge repositoriesLivna's maintainers have a policy to not work together with other 3rd party repositories. .)
  • [ATrpms], maintained by Axel Thimm and supporting Fedora Core 1 through 5.
    • (Updates base packages ahead of Core. Some administrators consider it a bad idea to update base packages outside of their official channel.)
  • [RPMforge], containing the packages of Matthias Saou, Dag Wieers and Dries that were previously available in three different repositories, supporting Fedora Core 1 through 5.FreshRPMS, PlanetCCRMA, Dries and DAG (RPMforge.net) build their packages together from the same sources. This ensures much greater cooperation and compatibility and will eventually lead to a merger. RPMforge is compatible with Fedora Extras, similar to Livna.http://rpmforge.net/user/faq/#compatibility-and-mixing
  • * [FreshRPMS], maintained by Matthias Saou, supporting Fedora Core 1 through 5
  • * [Dag], maintained by Dag Wieers, supporting Fedora Core 1 through 3
  • * [Dries], maintained by Dries Verachtert, supporting Fedora Core 1 through 5
  • * [PlanetCCRMA], maintained by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, supporting Fedora Core 1 through 5
    • A useful tool to work with repositories is Fedora Helper http://brandonhutchinson.com/Fedora_Helper.html. It is an automatic configurator for the "missing codecs" of Fedora Core. It uses the livna.org repository.

    Legal Status

    As the Fedora Extras project is only an arms-length away from the main Fedora project, it only maintains packages legally distributable in the United States. Other repositories may have different policies. For example, the Livna project maintains packages that may have legal issues within the United States or can be downloaded only by the end user.

    Some repositories also maintain "source-only" packages that require the user to download pre-built binaries that may not be available to the public. The package script then unpacks and repacks the binaries in a format more suitable for deployment on RPM-based systems.

    Yum and Apt

    The main tool to install software from repositories is the command yum. A graphical tool called pirut is, together with the update program pup, part of the standard installation since Fedora Core 5. Yumex http://yumex.python-hosting.com/ is a graphical alternative preferred by some reviewers, and available in Extras.

    Up until Fedora Core 4, maintainers of some of the extra repositories advocated the use of apt-rpm for update management - being written in C, it uses fewer CPU cycles and is therefore suitable for older computers, too. No release of apt-rpm for Fedora Core 5 has been made yet. apt-rpm also does not support the new multi-architecture package format, where one package for each support architecture on the machine is installed. An example would be i386 and x86_64 for AMD 64-bit systems.

    Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

    Fedora came about as a result of a new business strategy which Red Hat implemented late in 2003 - Red Hat now positions Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a business-oriented Linux distribution, and all official support is for that distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases are branched off Fedora Core, which has led some critics to observe that Fedora Core users are in effect beta testers for RHEL.

    The Fedora name

    The distribution most likely got its name from the fedora used in Red Hat's "Shadowman" logo. Red Hat has been tangled in disputes with the creators of the Fedora repository management software over the name, on which the company has attempted to secure trademark rights.[Red Hat Inc.'s Use of The Fedora Name]

    Version history

    Similar to the Red Hat products the Fedora Core Project is using codenames for their distributions.

     Fedora Core
    Version Name Date
    1 Yarrow November 5 2003
    2 Tettnang May 18 2004
    3 Heidelberg November 8 2004
    4 Stentz June 13 2005
    5 Bordeaux March 20 2006

    Trivia

    See also

    References

    External links

    Official sites

    Unofficial sites

    Compatibility information sites

    [ edit]
    Linux distributions
    CentOS | Debian | Fedora | Gentoo | Knoppix | Mandriva | MEPIS | Red Hat Enterprise | Slackware | SUSE | Ubuntu | more…

     

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