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. 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. 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.
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Versions
Stable
Fedora Core 4 (FC4, release name Stentz), the current 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 5 Test 3 is the current unstable release of Fedora Core. Fedora Core 5 Final will be the next stable release of Fedora Core, which will be released on March 20, 2006, delayed from the original March 15, 2006 release date.[1]
The preliminary release schedule of Fedora Core 5 is shown as follows:
* November 21, 2005 - Fedora Core 5 Test 1
* January 16, 2006 - Fedora Core 5 Test 2
* February 20, 2006 - Fedora Core 5 Test 3
* March 20, 2006 - Fedora Core 5 Final (this release will be stable)
This version will include the Mono development platform for the first time. Mono has been banished until now due to a unclear state of software patents of Microsoft.
Bleeding-edge
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. Currently there are two families of repositories. Packages are compatible inside the same family, but incompatible with the other.
* Fedora Extras (maintained by a group of volunteers and affiliated with the official Fedora Project) and Livna (a third-party repository maintained by a group of volunteers)
* FreshRPMS (maintained by Matthias Saou), Dag (maintained by Dag Wieers), Dries, and ATrpms (maintained by Axel Thimm)
Packages from both families, in general, cannot be mixed. The first family has the packages divided according with the license. Extras maintains packages legally distributable at the United States, while Livna maintains packages that may have legal issues within the United States or can be downloaded only by the end user. The second family has the packages divided according to the opinion of the maintainers. The incompatibility between the repositories is a subject of some contention within the larger Fedora community.
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