Overview of Fedora

Fedora is a general-purpose software collection and is based on RPM including an operating system developed by Fedora project. The main object of Fedora project is to provide the free and open source software to the computer users in IT and other industries. Fedora operating system has been sponsored by Red Hat. One of the main objectives of the developers of Fedora is to make the desired changes in all the Linux distributions instead of implementing fixes. With a number of versions and distributions; it is difficult to figure out what Fedora is more popular for. It offers an entire new concept in open-source software distributions to the global community in web world.

Fedora operating system

This is a Linux based operating system, which was created in year 2003. It is also called as a community distribution with name Fedora project. Fedora operating system was released at the same time when Red Hat Enterprise Linux has released. The prime purpose of this operating system was to serve as a source of applications for releases of Hat Enterprises Linux. As of June 2011, Fedora operating system has been rated as the third most popular operating systems.

Releases of Fedora

Fedora Core 1-4 was the very first set of releases of Fedora and got launched in year 2003 to 2005. These releases were followed by Fedora Core 5-6 and then Fedora 7 in the year 2007. All of these mentioned versions are not supported by Fedora Project these days. Fedora 8 was released in the year 2007, Fedora 9 in year 2008 and Fedora 10 by the end of year 2008. These versions are completely supported by Fedora project.

The latest version of Fedora operating system is Fedora 10 that is also known as ‘Cambridge’ and includes an entire new set of unique characteristics, such as faster startup with Plymouth, Solar artwork, installer packages based on web, Sugar Desktop Environment, support for ext4 filesystem and various others.

Distributions of Fedora project

There are a number of ways by which Fedora project is distributed to global world:

Fedora CD or DVD set: – A CD or DVD set of major Fedora packages at the delivery time.

Live Images: – DVD or CD sized images can be utilized to create a Live CD. It is also bootable from USB flash drive or can also be installed on a Hard Drive.

Minimal CD: – Fedora operating system can be used to install on FTP, HTTP or NFS

It also gets distributed as custom variations of Fedora, which are known as Fedora spins. These versions are created from a particular software packages sets. Not only this, they have software combination to meet the end user’s requirements too.

Fedora as open source software

One of the main reasons why Fedora project is famous is due to the reason that it is strongly backed by increasing community having the supporters from technically novice and advanced domains from the various parts of the globe. It has also been pointed out that they keep making unique and free open source applications for Fedora end users. These new features can be added to any other distributions of Linux easily. This is one of the major reasons why users call Fedora a factory for open source software innovations where they are able to make a significant contribution.

Any reported issues in any of the distributions of Fedora operating system are changed by the developers and they make sure that the updates are available to the Fedora users. Some of the open source releases under Fedora project are PolicyKit, SELinux, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, FreeIPA, D-bus and HAL.

Security in Fedora operating system

Like in most of the distributions of Linux, security is one of the most important features. A firewall is available in Fedora right from the start. It can easily be configured with the help of graphical interface or via terminal. SELinux or Security Enhanced Linux has been promoted by Fedora. This feature includes a number of security policies. Reportedly, these policies are missing in other Linux based distributions. Custom security enhancements are also available in Fedora. Fedora is one of the most preferred choices for web servers. Fedora has also been used as an operating system in a number of NASA systems as well as supercomputers including Roadrunner.