Red HatFedora

Red Hat/Fedora

Even if you have no experience with Linux, you've probably heard of Red Hatthe most well-known commercial version of Linux. Red Hat has recently undergone some organizational changes. Free Red Hat Linux has been replaced by Fedora Core, released by the Fedora project, which is initiated, supported, and contributed to by Red Hat. Fedora is an open source developer project with public testing, participation, and feedback. Fedora includes only open source software. Information on Fedora is available at fedora.redhat.com. Red Hat now only sells Red Hat Enterprise Linuxcommercial software appropriate for organization-wide use, emphasizing stability, reliability, and commercial support.

You can't buy Fedora from Red Hat. Red Hat only sells Red Hat Enterprise, a commercial version of Linux. To obtain Fedora, you download files from the Fedora Project Web site: fedora.redhat.com/download/. The files are images of installation CDs, which you can write to CD or install from disk. Installation is discussed in Chapter 4. However, the files are huge and downloading them over a dial-up connection is painful. You can purchase installation CDs through various vendors. The vendors don't provide a nice boxed set of software and manuals, such as you receive when you purchase Windows or a commercial distribution of Linux; they just provide CDs. A list of vendors is available at fedora.redhat.com/download/vendors.html.

Fedora features include the following:

• Multiple desktops: Provides both GNOME and KDE. GNOME is the default.

• Software updates: Red Hat provides a utility called up2date that keeps track of your current versions and automatically gets and installs updates for you when they become available.

• System utilities: Provides system tools developed by the Fedora project. Tools have an easy-to-use graphical interface, as well as a text-based interface. The names begin with redhat-config, such as redhat-config-network.

• Installation procedure: Provides either graphical or text interface for the installation procedure, using its own installer called Anaconda. The installation procedure detects and configures the system hardware. Provides Kickstart, a utility that allows scripted, unattended installation useful for system administrators.

• Well supported: One of the best supported distributions. Red Had maintains a mailing list at www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list. Also try the Fedora Forum at fedoraforum.org and the Fedora forum on Linux Questions at www.linuxquestions.org/questions/forumdisplay.php?forumid=35.