Product Reviews

Fedora is essentially the next version of Red Hat Linux. It appears as a result of Red Hat handing the General Public Licence (GPL) version of its software back to the community to develop. Although the Red Hat engineers will still work on it, development will be open so that anyone can join in. Fedora will also act as a test bed for new features that may be integrated in to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Our installation of Fedora went extremely smoothly, even picking up a prism 2.5-based PCI wireless card and setting the slightly odd 1,280x768 widescreen graphics resolution properly. The setup program is very similar to Red Hat 9, and Fedora will upgrade from this version. You can install over the network using a graphical installer, whereas previous versions were text-based only.

Once installed, Fedora is very smooth. It has a new graphical boot screen,

ADVERTISEMENT

and the new desktop graphics are elegant and crisp. It includes all the leading applications found with Red Hat 9, including the Evolution mail client, OpenOffice and the Mozilla web browser. The integration between all these components is getting better and smoother all the time, which makes working with the system a lot easier.

One significant improvement for those with money in mind is the fact that there is no need to register or pay for a Red Hat Network account, which was previously necessary for automatic updates to work. The updating tool up2date works independently of this system with Fedora Core. This means updates are entirely free and no personal information is needed to acquire them. There is also a new update method available called yum. This is far quicker than up2date and also allows network installation of packages in a similar way to Debian's apt-get.

Fedora is gearing more towards the desktop angle than being a server distribution - it looks great and has a lot of applications integrated into it. However, this is the first release so there will be a lot of underlying system work still to do.

Overall, Fedora is carrying on the development of Red Hat in the direction that its non-Enterprise products were headed before the company adjusted its focus. And it is continuing well, and at a faster pace than ever before. The new release schedule should give us up-to-date systems, with more features, more often.