Fedora Core
Fedora Core (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Fedora Linux) is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat, and derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution.
The Fedora Project has the goal of building a complete, general-purpose operating system from free software. Fedora came about as a result of a new business strategy which Red Hat implemented late in 2003. The Project envisages that conventional Linux home users will use Fedora Core, and intends that it replace the consumer distributions of Red Hat Linux. (Red Hat has positioned Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a business-oriented Linux distribution, and it offers software support for that distribution.) Support for Fedora comes from the greater community.
Versions
Stable
The Project released Fedora Core 1 (FC1, internal codename Cambridge, release name Yarrow) on November 6, 2003. Improvements over Red Hat Linux 9 included automated updates with yum, improved laptop support with ACPI and cpufreq, prelinking for faster program start time, and kernels with the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL). An AMD64 version appeared in March 2004.
Fedora Core 2 (FC2, release name Tettnang), the current stable version, reached release on May 18, 2004. It includes version 2.6 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2.1, and SELinux. This version also replaced XFree86 with the XOrg Foundation Open Source Public Implementation of X11. This release occasioned many complaints because of its problems with installation while dual-booting with Windows XP (actually caused by an issue with the 2.6 kernel's handling of partitions).
Unstable
The current test version of Fedora Core, version 3 test2, precedes the final version of 3, scheduled for release on November 1, 2004. It should include GNOME 2.8, GCC 3.4, and KDE 3.3.
See also
