Fedora 13 alpha has been released, and the faithful are encouraged to download, test and report. The traditional method of testing is to download a full CD iso image (about 700 MB), but if you read the recent post about Network booting with boot.fedoraproject.org, you’d have learned that all you now need to do to install any version of Fedora is to download a very small iso image (626 KB).
When that article was published, Fedora 13 had not yet been released, so the option to install it was not available in BFO. The screenshot below shows BFO’s installation page before the release of Fedora 13 alpha.
Boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO) is Fedora’s implementation of boot.kernel.org, a project designed to give computers the capability to boot from a network. The actual program that provides this capability is gPXE, which evolved from the Etherboot project. Fedora’s twist on gPXE allows you to network-boot current, past and future (Rawhide) releases of Fedora. All you need to do is download a small iso image (the current BFO weighs in at just 626 KB), transfer it to a media, boot of that media and perform any number of tasks that you would normally perform with a full CD or DVD iso image. The next few shots will take you through the features of BFO.
Disk encryption in one of the most overlooked and underused security tools in computing. When most people think about securing a computer or the operating system that powers it, a firewall, anti-virus, and other anti-malware software comes to mind. Those are all good and necessary tools, but they are only concerned with network security. What about physical security? What happens if someone gains unauthorized, physical access to your computer? Even with all the fancy firewall and other network security tools running, If the disk is not encrypted, check mate! Your data is now shared.
Fedora 12 is the latest major update to Fedora, the Linux distribution that counts RedHat as a major sponsor. Fedora is Free Software and as a consequence, it is not one of those distros that we expect to “just work” out of the box. So if you are new to Fedora, don’t expect the same user-friendliness that you’ll get with distros like Pardus, Hymera Open and Mandriva One (or even Mandriva Free). It is, however, still a decent distro. How decent? Continue reading to find out.
As is the custom here, we always start with the installer.
Aside from one small, but very important difference, configuring Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) in Fedora 9 is just about the same as configuring it in Foresight Linux, CentOS, and StartCom. All four distros use the Anaconda installer.
There are not a whole lot of active Linux or BSD-based Telephony/IP-PBX distros, but the few we have are quite good and easy to setup and configure. Of the four that we have profiled on this site, only AskoziaPBX is based on a BSD (FreeBSD) distro. The others – trixbox, Elastix, and AsteriskNOW – are all Linux-based. Whether Linux or BSD-based, the key application that makes them what they are is Asterisk.
