Fedora

[Darrell Michaud]

Fedora is very much a bleeding edge distribution. It usually has the most
late-breaking versions of packages. It is not unheard of to find
pre-release or beta versions, sometimes against the original upstream
source's wishes. It also tends to be a showcase of ideas
never-been-packaged-in-a-distribution-before coming out of RedHat's
research and development. For all that instability, it also tends to be on
the leading edge of some interesting security and privacy technologies. It
has a very good SELinux configuration out of the box, and easy
install-time support for full encrypted disk volumes. It's a great
distribution for experimenting with the latest and greatest, and is
generally quite usable.

One major downside is the upgrade treadmill- Fedora's support for previous
versions does not last long and new versions are released about every six
months, forcing a cycle of frequent whole-system upgrades.

Another difficulty for end users is Fedora's scrupulous avoidance of any
software that might have legal issues being distributed in the US, such as
most popular audio and video codecs. Fedora does not have built-in support
proprietary kernel modules or drivers, such as the ATI and NVidia
accelerated drivers. If you want all those things, you have to get it from
third-party repositories. Luckily, there are many to choose from that
specifically target fedora users. I like freshrpms and occasionally livna.

Fedora 10 is not scheduled for final release until Nov. If you are going
to try it I would stick with Fedora 9 and not get pre-release versions of
10 unless you are incurably curious. In general the final release tends to
see a massive wave of fixed packages 1-2 weeks after its initial release.

It is an unlikely linux distribution choice for a business use case, or
for a non-technical user's situation, but for a technical user's personal
system or experimentation system it is fun and interesting.


Bruce Labitt wrote:
> Now that we've heard from Jarrod, it gives me the opportunity to ask a
> question or two about Fedora.
>
> You may remember my woes of dealing with SciLinux and essentially
> concluding it wasn't modern enough for what I wanted to do.  (64 bit /
> 3D imaging / rotation / scientific)  I am not too happy with wrestling
> with the SciLinux distro to get stuff done.
>
> Does Fedora suit my needs?  I thought it was safer to go with Scientific
> Linux 5.2 - sure it was "safe", but it wasn't productive enough.  Lesson
> learned perhaps.  I dunno, maybe I'm dense.  I took my shot at it and
> ended up in flames:0 .  So I get to try again.  I guess I'm lucky to at
> least try again.  (I'm a glutton for punishment - I have YDL on my QS22
> blade.)
>
> Is there a Fedora 10? or is that in alpha?  I just am a bit leary of the
> upgrade cycle for Fedora.  Can one "relatively painlessly" upgrade from
> Fedora 9 to 10?
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