LinuxLinks Review
(8/8/07)
By Kevin E. Glosser
Final thoughts
Fedora
7 has seen the word “Core” trimmed from it's name.
This reflects
just one of several changes internally to the project. With the first
ever inclusion of tools to create your own version of Fedora, Fedora
7 really reaches out to the community, quite literally. If you don't
like it, then by all means change it to be the way you want. The
Fedora Project has given you the power. To date this is the most
successful release of Fedora in my opinion. Some of that has to be
attributed to the continued maturation of several open source
projects. However, it's clear the Fedora Project deserves credit too.
The Linux desktop is steadily approaching competitive status with
it's proprietary alternatives (Mac OS X Leopard looks like a worthy
opponent, however). Although I cannot predict the day I can recommend
Linux to any desktop user, I feel it isn't too far away. Fedora, in
it's
current form is a great distribution for any Linux user wanting to
stay current. Linus
Torvalds has it on his machines currently. Maybe
you should too.
Red Hat's effort to include the community more
in the development of
Fedora has succeeded. Available online are some of the meeting notes
and irc logs of the governing board. They are transparent enough to
indicate the community does have an influence on this distro and it
shows in the final product. The Fedora project continues to improve,
while simultaneously being influenced more by the community. This is
unlikely to be a coincidence.
In the future, I'd like to see further
integration of Compiz into
the desktop. This will be difficult due to the proprietary nature of
some of the video card drivers required by it's use. However, the
solution to that issue is already under way. An experimental driver,
named “nouveau” offers to provide free and open
source drivers
for Nvidia cards. It is included in Fedora 7, but disabled by
default. As for other manufacturers, a solution is not mentioned.
Three dimensional acceleration of the desktop is not going away, that
much is certain.
All other shortcomings are moot in mentioning.
They either fall into
the category of extreme nitpicking or succumb directly to the Fedora
project's challenge...”Why don't you add it yourself? We gave
you
the ability to.” For those unable to contribute, you can grab
a
custom version of Fedora which already must be starting to appear on
the internet. The original spin performs very well on it's own,
however. Whoever said “You get what you pay for.”,
never used
Fedora 7.
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