| Highly flexible Fedora 7 Linux arrives |
May 31, 2007
 Analysis -- On May 31, Red Hat's sponsored and community supported open source Fedora Project released the latest version of its distribution: Fedora 7. Besides being a cutting edge Linux distribution, it features a new build capability that enables users to create their own custom distributions.
Fedora 7 now boasts a completely open-source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances and distributions that can be targeted to meet individual needs.
Max Spevack, leader of the Fedora Project, stated: "With our new open source build process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly powerful."
"This is the first version of Fedora where nothing happens exclusively behind Red Hat's walls," explained Spevack. "It's all been open-sourced and pushed out to the community. Previously Red Hat built Fedora Core, while the community worked on Fedora Extra,"
Red Hat's engineer and Fedora Project board member, Bill Nottingham, in January 2007 announced that Core and Extra would merge. Fedora 7 does away with this distinction; the new single Fedora repository is accessible to Red Hat employees and community members alike, giving the community more influence over Fedora than ever before.
"Beyond the usual set of upstream changes and improvements, our latest release is by far the most exciting and flexible to date Fedora 7 provides the first appliance development platform that is 100 percent open source with an entirely free distribution build toolchain," continued Spevack. "The Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and the distributions are built with an external, open source compose tool that allows access by the entire Fedora community."
Spevack also said that, as a result of the open-source tool chain and public build environment, users can now customize their distribution like never before. "With Revisor, a GUI application that looks like Anaconda (The Fedora graphical installation program), users can pick, choose, and build their own version of the distribution." For example, you can create a Fedora that uses KDE, instead of GNOME, as its interface.
"You don't need to use our GUI tools, though," said Spevack. "If you can write a Kickstart file, you can build your own without using a GUI." Kickstart is a text file that's usually used for automating Red Hat and Fedora installations.
In addition, Fedora now supports live CD, DVDs, and USB devices. Spevack believes that this capability, combined with the new development toolchain, will make Fedora very popular with those that want to create software appliances.
Other companies, notably rPath, which was founded by former Red Hat engineers, have already targeted the market for easy creation of custom Linux distributions. Spevack said the difference between what Fedora is doing and what rPath does is that Red Hat's "focus is on the fact that if you want to start with the Fedora base and turn it into something else, or add your own third-party RPM, it's all out there in code you can download and use. RPath's backend is proprietary. It's about all making the whole chain open."
He added, "We are eating our own dog-food. We use the exact same build system to create Fedora."
Spevack concluded, "We'll advertise the most popular spins on Fedora on the Fedora site. So, if someone created a very small distribution it might be advertised as Damn Small Fedora Linux." This is a play on the popular DSL (Damn Small Linux) distribution.
In addition to the new, open build system and live media support, Fedora 7 supports KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Qemu virtualization technologies, as well as Xen. The Fedora graphical virtualization manager can be used to manage all of its virtualization programs.
Fedora 7 is built on top of the Linux 2.6.21 kernel. For its interface, Fedora uses GNOME 2.18. It also includes a goodly assortment of desktop programs. These include Evolution 2.10.1, OpenOffice 2.2, Firefox 2.0.0.3, and Pidgin 2.0 (formerly called GAIM). Additional features are listed in our coverage of the fourth Fedora 7 release candidate.
Fedora 7 is now available for download for the i386, x86-64, and ppc architectures. For a listing of mirrors and BitTorrent sites, see the Fedora download page. However, not all mirrors have been updated yet to the latest version. You should also keep in mind that demand for the latest version is already high and, in turn, downloads are moving slowly. The distribution is available as a DVD ISO and as a network installation.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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