Fedora in Your Home

Fedora's Personal Desktop install copies a special set of preselected software packages onto your hard drive; these are suitable for small office/home office (SOHO) users. This option provides a wealth of productivity tools for document management, printing, communication, and personal productivity.

NOTE

Don't confuse Personal Desktop with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a free community project, so it can only include nonproprietary software. RHEL comes with specialist business applications that Red Hat licenses from other companies. Fedora and RHEL mirror each other in a number of ways but are not identical!

The Personal Desktop installation requires nearly 2GB of hard drive space but should easily fit onto smaller hard drives in older Pentium-class PCs. The install also contains administrative tools, additional authoring and publishing clients, a variety of editors, a GNOME-based X11 desktop, support for sound, graphics editing programs, and graphical and text-based Internet tools. You can customize the selection to include or sidestep installation of unwanted software. See Chapter 3 for details.

Connecting to the Internet is a snap, and Fedora supports modem dialup and other broadband connections, such as cable modems or digital subscriber line (DSL). See Chapter 18, "Internet Connectivity," for more information. When you do connect, you can do so in relative confidence because firewall protection from malicious intruders and other attackers can be thwarted by running the lokkit or system-config-securitylevel clients. See Chapter 17, "Network Connectivity," to learn how to set up a network.

If you have a digital camera, run the gphoto2 client to download, organize, and manage your digital images. You can then fine-tune your pictures by editing them using one of the finest digital image editors in the world: The GIMP. See Chapter 10, "Multimedia Applications," for details on editing graphics.

Fedora can be used for a variety of purposes, and every user has different needs. Some of them might be esoteric. For example, I use Fedora to program and manage thousands of frequencies on various radio scanners and amateur radio transceivers, run a high-frequency shortwave radio via a graphical interface on the desktop, host wireless (802.11a/b/g) printing for several workstations, manage digital recording of my favorite TV episodes, provide secure remote access via a firewall, and listen to my favorite music playlists via a server.