|  Fedora Core is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora aims to be a complete, general-purpose operating system from open source software. Fedora is designed to be easily installed and configured with a simple graphical installer and the 'system-config' suite of configuration tools. Packages and their dependencies can be easily downloaded and installed with the yum utility. New releases of Fedora come out every six months. The name Fedora Core distinguishes the main Fedora packages from those of the Fedora Extras project, which provides add-ons to Fedora Core. Fedora was derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution. The project envisages that conventional Linux home users will use Fedora Core, and intends that it replace the consumer distributions of Red Hat Linux. |
| Fedora came about as a result of a new business strategy which Red Hat implemented late in 2003 - Red Hat now positions Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a business-oriented Linux distribution, and all official support is for that distribution. Support for Fedora comes from the greater community (although Red Hat staff work on it, Red Hat does not provide official support for Fedora). Versions: Fedora Core 4 (FC4, release name Stentz), the current stable version, was released on June 13, 2005 for the i386, AMD64, and PowerPC architectures. It includes GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4, GCC 4.0, a gcj-compiled version of the Eclipse IDE, and version 2.6.11 of the Linux kernel. Fedora Core 3 (FC3, release name Heidelberg), the previous stable version, was released on November 8, 2004 for the i386 and AMD64 architectures. It includes GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3.0, X.Org Server 6.8.1, the Xen virtualizer, and version 2.6.9 of the Linux kernel. |
