< Back to index

Fedora Core is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. It aims to be a complete, general-purpose operating system that contains only free and open source software. Fedora Core is derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution, and it is intended to replace the consumer distributions of Red Hat Linux aimed towards home users. Support for Fedora comes from the greater community (Red Hat staff work on it, but Red Hat does not provide official support for Fedora). New releases of Fedora come out every six to eight months.

History


The Fedora Project was created in late 2003, when Red Hat Linux was discontinued. Red Hat recommended that commercial Red Hat Linux users switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which continues to be Red Hat's only officially-supported Linux distribution, while providing Fedora Core for more casual users. RHEL branches its releases from versions of Fedora Core, which has led some critics to observe that Fedora Core users are in effect beta testers for RHEL. See the RHEL page for the versions of Fedora Core and their corresponding RHEL versions.

Red Hat's release of Fedora Core started a popular trend amongst commercial Linux distribution vendors, that of creating a community distribution closely related to a commercial distribution, with the community distribution acting as an open development lab leading to the commercial distribution. See Commercial and community Linux distributions by the same vendor.

Naming


The name derives from Fedora Linux, a volunteer project that provided extra software for the Red Hat Linux distribution, and from the characteristic fedora used in Red Hat "Shadowman" logo. Fedora Linux was eventually absorbed into the Fedora Project. Red Hat has been tangled in disputes with the creators of the Fedora repository management software over the name, on which Red Hat has attempted to secure trademark rights.

Fedora is sometimes called Fedora Linux and Fedora Core Linux, though these are not official names. The word "Core" distinguishes the main Fedora packages from those of the Fedora Extras project, which provides add-ons to Fedora Core. The difference between these two repositories is that Red Hat maintains Core and Extras is maintained by volunteers.

After Fedora Core 6 it was decided to merge the Core and Extras repository[https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-January/msg00091.html], and the next release will be known as Fedora 7.

Overview


Fedora Core is distributed in a five-CD set or on a single DVD; only the first two CDs are required for a basic installation. Network installations over HTTP, FTP, and NFS are also supported. GNOME is Fedora Core's default desktop environment; KDE is also included on the official CDs and DVDs. Fedora is designed to be easily installed and configured using a suite of simple graphical installers and configuration tools, and uses the GNU GRUB boot loader to start itself on computers with multiple operating systems.

Fedora Core is intended to be distributed on CD and DVD media, and it only contains a small selection of packages. There are available several software repositories with extra software to complete the distribution. The official ones are Fedora Core, with an image of the whole system, Fedora Updates, with new versions, and Fedora Extras, which contains almost 7,000 packages. There is also a number of unofficial repositories that provide additional software that is not packaged by Extras, often due to copyright and patent issues.

Software package management is handled by the yum utility; graphical interfaces to yum called "pirut" and "pup" (the latter solely for updates) are provided, as well as "puplet", a panel notification applet. apt-rpm can also be used; a multi-lib capable version capable of using native yum metadata is included in Extras. Red Hat and the package maintainers release patches and updates regularly that can be installed with these tools.

Releases


The Fedora Project has released six stable versions of Fedora Core. Each stable release is preceded by three test releases, which allow users to test and give feedback on new features in the upcoming stable release. Fedora Core also has a set of "bleeding-edge" repositories called "Rawhide" containing packages currently under development. New packages that end up in Fedora Core (and later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) are first added to Rawhide; while not for everyday use, some developers and testers use it as a primary operating system.

The Fedora Project does not provide updates for versions of Fedora Core other than the most-recent and second-most-recent. Users needing long-term support are often encouraged by community members to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux or one of it's clones.

Distributions based on Fedora Core


* Berry Linux, a medium-sized Fedora Core-based distribution that provides support for Japanese and English.
* Fox Linux, a Fedora Core-based distribution made in Italy, designed for basic home computing tasks such as browsing the Web, writing and printing documents, using multimedia and burning discs.
* BLAG Linux, a stripped down 1-CD FC with Debian's apt system.
* LinuxTLE, a Thai distribution produced by NECTEC
* Yellow Dog Linux, a Fedora Core-based distribution for the PowerPC platform.
* Aurora SPARC Linux, a Fedora Core-based distribution for the SPARC platform.
* YOPER

Sony's PlayStation 3 is capable of running the PowerPC version of Fedora Core (http://www.youtube.com/watch_fullscreen?video_id=NnAn3h7kTM4), as well as Yellow Dog Linux and Gentoo. These three are the only third-party operating systems that have been demonstrated to be compatible with the PS3. However, other distributions have been proven to work but have not been officially documented.

[http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions Fedora's wiki] also has a list of derived distributions.
This entry uses material from from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Disclaimer.