“Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project.” The Fedora Project is sponsored by Redhat, Inc.
Origin - Home Page: USA - Fedora
Desktop: Gnome by default, but other desktop environments including the 3D desktops are available.
Price: Free to use and distribute. Open Source.
Installer: Fedora’s installer, the Anaconda, has support for LVM and RAID. LVM is the default disk partitioning scheme. While it has for a long time been possible to encrypt individual logical volumes (partitions), a new feature introduced in Fedora 9 makes it possible to encrypt the system. This adds another security layer to a Fedora system, which is a very good thing, especially for those occasions when your system (think laptop) is lost or stolen: Access to the system will be denied without the correct passphrase.
Multimedia/Internet: Firefox 3 is the only browser installed and, out of the box, it is not a very useful application: It cannot handle any multimedia content that are typically found on the Web pages. To do that, you have to utilize the Codeina Codec Installer Service, a fee-based service for browser and media player plugins.
The only video player installed is Totem, but it’s no use for playing commercial DVD videos, unless if you are willing to pay 28 euros to Fleundo, the company that owns the Codeina Codec Service. You see, in Fedora 9, the Fedora team decided to remove all license-encumbered applications. That means that all the free plugins needed by Totem and Firefox or any other media player or browser that you install on the system are not installed, and are not even in the default repository. So unless you use the Codeina service or figure out a way (it’s actually quite easy) to use plugins other than those available via Codeina, you can’t play any multimedia content, other than audio (mp3) files or CDs.
For playing audio files and CDs, Rhythmbox and Sound Juicer are your options. Sound Juicer has limited playback functionalities, so it likely that you will settle for Rhythmbox. But even Rhythmbox is not as good as Exaile, another media player, which is not installed. For a better audio experience, we suggest that you use the package manager (System > Administration > Add/Remove Software) to install Exaile
Productivity/Utilities: OpenOffice.org, a free and open source office suite similar to Microsoft Office, is installed by default. Planner, a project management application for the Gnome desktop is also installed. The usual set of desktop applets and utilities are available.
Security: In Fedora 9, a firewall is installed and enabled by default (just the way it should be). As an added security feature, SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) is installed and also enabled by default. SELinux “provides finer-grained security controls than those available in traditional Linux systems”. SELinux is equivalent to Novell’s AppArmor, which comes pre-installed in openSUSE. A new security feature introduced in Fedora 9 is the option to encrypt the system during installation. What this does is require a passphrase before the system boots. Makes it tough to boot a stolen a lost laptop, or any system running Fedora 9 with system encryption enabled. Just don’t forget your passphrase.
Games/Graphics: Fedora just has the stock set of Gnome desktops games. More games, including 3D games that are a part of the default installation of Sabayon may be installed using the gpk-application, the package manager for Gnome.
F-Spot photo manager, XSane, and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) are the graphics applications installed.
Administration: gpk-application is Fedora’s package manager. Like other graphical package managers in Linux, it is easy to use. However, gpk-application is very slow in searching and retrieving package information. For managing user accounts and gaining access to admin privileges, Fedora, unlike Ubuntu, uses the traditional root account. SELinux and the Fedora firewall have very easy to navigate graphical interfaces.
An admin tool that is part of the default installation in Fedora 8, but is missing in Fedora 9, is the gui tool to manage LVM. It makes managing LVM truly fun. The tool, system-config-lvm, may be installed via the package manager (search for “lvm”). The screenshots below are different views of system-config-lvm interface.
Miscellanea: Fedora is a good distro, however:
- “Forcing” the Codeina plugin service on users is not a good idea
- Removing system-config-lvm from the default install doesn’t make sense. We know it is easy to install, but what is the reason for not installing it by default?
To make Fedora fun to use, you’ll have to spend some time customizing it. If, however, you do not have the time, and want something that works out of the box, we suggest Mint. Note. however, that the Mint installer does not have support for LVM, RAID, and other advanced features of Anaconda, the Fedora installer.
Download: Bootable iso images for 32-bit, 64-bit, and PowerPC architectures are available for download.
