Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition
What Is Fedora?
What Is Fedora?
Fedora is the heir to Red Hat Linux and incorporates many of the features and software tools included with previous Red Hat Linux distributions, along with many enhancements. Red Hat Linux spawned many imitators in the Linux world in the past decade, and many of these imitators have gone on to create credible products and distributions.
Thanks to the different ways you can get Fedora, you no longer need to worry about downloading multiple CDs. Included with this book is a DVD that contains 3GB of packages just waiting to be installed onto your hard drive. Alternatively, you could snag either the Live CD (with the Gnome interface) or the KDE Live CD (with the KDE interface, funnily enough) if you want a usable yet light installation. More than 5,000 separate software packages are in Fedora. This distribution comprises the Linux kernel, installation utilities, thousands of pages of documentation, several thousand fonts, a comprehensive graphical networking interface, and several thousand individual commands and clients.
Fedora provides a base, or core, framework operating system and desktop composed entirely of free software. Fedora includes the Nodoka desktop theme and has an improved consistency in the two major graphical desktops available for use: Gnome and KDE.
You can expect an extensive amount of Linux software to be supported by Fedora, and in fact an extensive library of software packages outside the Fedora release is available through third-party repositories. This means your first Fedora CD-ROMs or DVD are just the beginning of a large collection of Linux software!
Fedora provides the latest version of the X Window System and its server, X11R7, which sports improved and integral font handling. The Linux desktop has never looked better, and you will notice the difference when you browse the web, use one of the dozen or so word processors and text editors included with Fedora, or view text at the command line in a terminal window.
Fedora is slated for upgrades two or three times a year, according to the Fedora Project. In reality, however, work never ceases on the distribution because open source developers, along with Red Hat engineers, cross-pollinate Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and Fedora with software package upgrades, security updates, and bug fixes. Fedora's free, online upgrade system is available via the Internet.
Red Hat works to an approximate 18-month release cycle for Enterprise Linux. This cycle is required to provide third-party application developers time to test, deploy, and market products. In the past, Red Hat has used a 6-month release schedule for the consumer version of Red Hat Linux, with a 3- to 4-month beta cycle for development and testing. Fedora will have a similar schedule; the Fedora Project has stated it intends to "produce time-based releases of Fedora about two times a year."
Distribution Version and Kernel Numbering Schema
There is a specific numbering system for Linux kernels, kernel development, and Fedora's kernel versions. Note that these numbers bear no relation to the version number of your Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora distribution version numbers are assigned by the Fedora Project, whereas most of the Linux kernel version numbers are assigned by Linus Torvalds and his legion of kernel developers.
To see the date your Linux kernel was compiled, use the uname command with its -v command-line option. To see the version of your Linux kernel, use the -r option. The numbers, such as 2.6.23-1.49, represent the major version (2), minor version (6), and patch level (23). The number 1 is the developer patch level, while the final number (49) is the distro-specific version and is assigned by the Fedora Project.
Minor numbers that are even are considered "stable" and generally fit for use in production environments, whereas odd minor numbers (such as a Linux 2.7 source tree) represent versions of the Linux kernel under development and testing. You will find only stable versions of the Linux kernel included with this book. You can choose to download and install a beta (test) version of the kernel, but this is not recommended for a system destined for everyday use. Most often, beta kernels are installed to provide support and testing of new hardware or operating system features.
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