LinuxLinks Review
(8/8/07)
By Kevin E. Glosser
Introduction / Hardware
If you're a Fedora user the end of May means
one thing...time for a
new release! This year was no different as the Fedora project
continued its aggressive six month release schedule. Fedora 7, code
named “Moonshine”, is the latest version of the Red
Hat
influenced Linux distribution. Fedora regulars will note the absence
of the word “Core” in the new name. This isn't the
only change
with this release. We'll delve into what's new in 7 as well as review
Fedora from a desktop standpoint.
Fedora is Red Hat's testbed for it's
enterprise edition. Features first appear in Fedora before graduating
to Red Hat Enterprise
Linux.
Although
Fedora users are used to
being Red Hat's guinea pigs, the project has it's own set of goals. Red
Hat's challenge has been to create a partnership between it's
engineers and the open source community in an effort to create
“the
best operating system and platform that free software can
provide.”
Fedora
is governed by a board of 9 members, 5 selected by Red
Hat, 4 by the open source community. The chairperson, selected by Red
Hat, has veto rights over decisions made by it. Although the
board
provides the “highest
level
of decision making within the Fedora project”, it came into
existence after Fedora Core 5. The
establishment of the board is part of Red Hat's desire to establish a
more cohesive partnership with the Fedora community. Fedora
Core 6 and Fedora 7 are
the
first two examples of the new partnership. We'll use the final
product as the true metric of how this new commitment to the
community is working.
Fedora
is designed for Linux users who want to
stay on the cutting
edge, yet still benefit from a stable environment. Free software is
stressed in this distribution. You will therefore not find common or
often used packages that contain proprietary non-free code. GNOME is
the desktop environment of choice. Packages are managed with Red Hat's
rpm system, overseen by pup (a simple interface for updates).
Although Fedora might not have been the distro you would recommend to
Linux novices, this may soon be possible due to tools included within
it. New utilities allowing Fedora users to repackage, recreate
the distro in a fashion of their choosing, certainly provide the
opportunity to create a “newbie” variation of
Fedora
that might
match or exceed Ubuntu in ease of use.
Reviews
are always going to be influenced by the reviewer's past
experiences. I've
been using Linux since 1997, when the first distribution I tried was
Red Hat 4.1 (Editor -- if only you'd installed the 50 floppy SLS
distro, you'd understand what pain was). Since then I've had every
version of Red Hat (and
Fedora) installed on my home computer, minus
one. I've
tried other distributions over the years, Mandrake/Mandriva, Xandros,
Ubuntu but nothing has made me want to abandon my original distro.
Fedora has been the sole operating system to reside on my computer
for over two years. Cedega
helped me kick my Microsoft habit, freeing
me from my dual booting days.
My
desktop computer is getting a little old in the tooth, but it's still
modern enough for this review. It's a modified Dell Dimension 8300
with a 3 GHz single core Pentium 4 processor with a front side bus
running at 800 MHz. The computer has 1 GB of dual channel DDR 400
memory. The original video card was replaced with a ASUS
GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128 MB of VRAM.
This video card is quite dated by today's more modern options.
However, it does work well allowing popular games like World
of
Warcraft and Quake 4 to play on the machine. Sound is provided by a
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 sound card.
Let's install Fedora 7...
Installation
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