Fedora (Linux distribution)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fedora
Fedora logo
Fedora 32 Desktop with Gnome 3.36.1
Fedora 32 with the Gnome interface 3.36.1
developer Fedora project
License (s) GPL and others
First publ. November 6, 2003
Current  version 32 (April 28, 2020)
Kernel Linux
ancestry GNU / Linux
↳ Red Hat Linux
↳ Fedora
Architecture (s) AMD64 , PowerPC , ARM , s390x
Installation medium DVD, CD, USB stick
Languages) multilingual
Others Standard desktop environment : Gnome
getfedora.org

Fedora [ fɨˈdɒr.ə ] is an RPM -based Linux distribution . The aim of the developers of the distribution is to promote free software and to design an operating system for as diverse a target group as possible . The development is organized in the online community of the Fedora project , which is led by the company Red Hat . Fedora is the direct successor to Red Hat Linux . The English word fedora refers to a special type of felt hat , the trademark of the Red Hat company .

target group

Fedora is developed for general use on server and desktop systems. The Fedora project itself describes its distribution as suitable for beginners as well as experienced users. Nonetheless, critics often emphasize that Fedora is not particularly suitable for Linux beginners because it is too complicated in certain areas. This different perception could arise from the fact that the developers have more of the Fedora-based Enterprise Linux in mind - the users of which can be found primarily in companies and government organizations - than the average user.

In contrast to other Linux distributions, there is no long-term support. The lifecycle of a Fedora version is designed for 13 months, a new version appears about every six months, which is why Fedora is unsuitable for long-term use (e.g. on embedded systems or systems with years of uptime ). In contrast to other distributions, it always offers very up-to-date software.

Fedora project

Principles

The Fedora Project formulates its goals as follows:

The Fedora Project is a partnership of free software community members from around the globe. The Fedora Project builds open source software communities and produces a Linux distribution called Fedora.
[...]
The Fedora Project creates a world where,

  • free culture is welcoming and widespread,
  • collaboration is commonplace, and
  • people control their content and devices.

“ The Fedora Project is a partnership between members of the free software community from around the world. The Fedora Project forms open source software communities and produces a Linux distribution called Fedora.
[…]
The Fedora project creates a world in which

  • the culture of free content is welcome and widespread,
  • Cooperation is a matter of course and
  • People are in control of their content and devices. "

These intentions are expressed in the four principles:

  1. Freedom ("Freedom")
  2. Friends ("Friends")
  3. Functions ("Features")
  4. First

The "freedom" refers to the freedom of the software as opposed to proprietary software . Promoting such FLOSS is a concern of the developers, which is why Fedora is offered free, open-source and expressly for further development. "Friends" represents the strength of this worldwide community (community) of very diverse people who work together on the development of free software. "Functions" expresses the pursuit of versatility and flexibility in order to cover the needs of as many users as possible in the best possible way. “First” stands for the will to innovate and the pioneering role that is sought within the open source movement .

As with the predecessor of Fedora, the principle applies here that only computer programs with a completely free license may be included in the distribution. The only exception is firmware in binary form ( binary blob ), which is provided with a license and which allows free use. The most prominent consequence of this licensing policy is that Fedora z. B. does not support MP3 or DVD-Video playback, but must be installed from third-party sources.

The Fedora community includes Red Hat employees as well as developers from other companies, independent volunteer developers, including students . In addition to software developers, there are specialists in marketing , linguistic translation and graphic design . In order to facilitate the cooperation of this partly very inhomogeneous community, the Fedora project has two principles:

  1. So with every decision the effect on others has to be considered and at the same time
  2. Treat others' decisions with respect. If there is a disagreement on technical or social issues, an attempt is first made to understand why there was a disagreement before attempting to reach an agreement.

Project management

The Fedora project is led by a ten-member so-called Fedora Board (English for committee ). In addition to the chairman - who is appointed by Red Hat and has veto power - the board consists of four chairman-appointed members and five members elected by the Fedora community . The board decides on all strategic and financial issues of the project. The technical management and thus the responsibility for the development work of the project lies with the so-called Fedora Engineering Steering Committee ( FESCo for short , English for Technical Control Committee ). The FESCo consists of nine members elected by the Fedora Community . The discussions and decisions of both bodies are mostly online and publicly traceable, as the regular meetings usually take place on an IRC channel. The Chairman of the Board , as acting Fedora Project Leader (FPL), also coordinates the implementation of the decisions of the Board and FESCo . Matthew Miller has served as Chairman and FPL since June 2014 .

financing

The Fedora project is mainly funded by the Red Hat company. Red Hat would like to have the most complete and solid foundation possible for its commercial product Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In addition to providing financial resources, Red Hat sponsorship consists primarily of the collaboration of numerous Red Hat employees in the Fedora community . In addition, Red Hat provides its infrastructure, such as B. servers or conference rooms are available to the Fedora project free of charge.

In addition to Red Hat and individual private persons, the companies Arrival Telecom Inc., BodHOST, Colocation America Inc., Dell Inc., Ibiblio, InterNetX GmbH, OSU Open Source Lab, proIO GmbH, ServerBeach, Technomonk Industries, Telia Company AB and tummy. com ltd. known as sponsors of Fedora. Some of these companies sell hardware with Fedora software preinstalled, or they are distribution users.

Meetings

Several times a year , the Fedora Project holds meetings called FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference), for which Fedora users and developers meet for several days somewhere in the world. In addition to lectures , podiums , meetings and social events, so-called hack fests are organized at the FUDCons , in which a group of developers tackles and programs a specific question together.

distribution

Fedora is enjoying great popularity as the successor to the old Red Hat Linux versions and has replaced it in many companies and institutions. Most of the commercial applications, daemons, and drivers that were previously made available for RHL are now also offered for Fedora, which means that this distribution has widespread support from companies and institutions. According to the surveys by Distrowatch , Fedora has been one of the five most important Linux distributions in the world since 2004.

Until 2008, Wikipedia was hosted on Red Hat Linux 9 and various Fedora versions . At the end of 2008, all 400 Wikimedia Foundation servers were migrated to Ubuntu . The Roadrunner supercomputer , built by IBM and operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), uses both RHEL and Fedora as the operating system. The Philippine government had 13,000 computers with Fedora installed on them distributed to schools in 2008. At ARM TechCon 2013 , Dell presented the first ARM 64-bit server that was equipped with Fedora as the operating system.

A survey of the number of users is only possible by means of an estimate, since, unlike with commercial software, no sales figures can be recorded and no product activation is necessary for use. Only the number of downloads of the installation media ( ISO images ) and the accesses to the update server ( repositories ) can be counted. These survey methods are very vague, as the system can be installed on many computers with a single installation medium ( CD-ROM or DVD) and, in turn, IP addresses are often used dynamically , which can lead to multiple counting.

During the lifetime of Fedora 16 , a total of 2,143,906 installation media were downloaded. From May 2007 to May 2012, an average of around 5 million individual IP addresses per Fedora version obtained updates from one of the repository servers.

Fedora was the third most popular Linux distribution among web hosts in December 2005. If you add up all of the Fedora derivatives and include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives such as CentOS or Scientific Linux , 2005 saw a spread of around 50 percent.

At the end of 2008, the Fedora Project claimed leadership in the Linux world. This happened due to similar statements made by the Ubuntu developer Canonical . Allegedly there should have been 8 million Ubuntu installations. The Fedora Project counted 3.4 million active Fedora 7 installations , 3.9 million Fedora 8 installations, and 1.8 million Fedora 9 installations, and from these numbers derived its claim to leadership in the Linux business. Red Hat points out that its own numbers - like those of the competition - are fraught with the great uncertainties described above.

According to interviews from 2008, 2012 and 2014, Fedora is used by Linus Torvalds .

technical features

System requirements

For Fedora 19 , a processor with a clock speed of at least 1 GHz , 1  GB of RAM and 10 GB of free space on the hard drive was given as the minimum requirement. Fedora can also be operated without graphics hardware, which is e.g. B. can be useful on a server. A graphics processor that is newer than Intel GMA900 , Nvidia GeForce-FX NV30 and ATI- (AMD-) Radeon 9500 is recommended for a graphical user interface . More powerful graphics processors are necessary to get a smooth graphical representation. The desktop environments Xfce and especially LXDE are optimized for low resource consumption and therefore require less powerful hardware than Gnome 3 or KDE .

Hardware support

Fedora is primarily developed for x86 and AMD64 architectures. In addition, there are variants for the ARM , PowerPC (64-  bit ) and s390x architectures - mostly completed after the official release . Since the importance of the ARM platform has increased significantly in recent years, it was planned to give the ARM variant the same priority as the x86 and AMD64 architectures in Fedora version 20. Pidora is a remix for the Raspberry Pi supported by the Fedora project . For Fedora versions that are no longer up-to-date, there were partially variants for the following architectures: IA-64 , PowerPC (32 bit), SPARC (32 and 64 bit) and System / 390 .

Fedora includes drivers for most of the PC hardware currently available. The installation media (CD-ROM or DVD) only contain some of the drivers, which is why certain drivers have to be downloaded and installed later. Fedora includes free drivers for AMD - ( Radeon and Radeonhd ) and NVIDIA - GPUs ( nouveau ) , the hardware acceleration and 3D support allow. For licensing reasons, Fedora does not contain any proprietary drivers. This is why such drivers for AMD or Nvidia graphics processors from third-party software repositories have to be installed later.

Flavors and Spins

Since Fedora 21, there are three "flavors" (English flavor ) on the sub-areas Workstation , Server and Cloud are aligned. These “flavors” all contain the same tools, libraries and APIs called “bases”, but differ in their configuration and in the software packages based on them.

The preferred desktop environment has been Gnome 3 since Fedora 15. Therefore, Gnome 3 is included in the "Workstation Flavor". In addition to the “flavors”, there are special so-called spins that are offered with the desktop environment KDE , Xfce , LXDE , Cinnamon , MATE or Enlightenment . In addition to these spins maintained by the Fedora project itself , there are other spins optimized for certain applications or interests. These include spins for: safety analysis , electronics development, science , design & creation , students and robotics .

Installation media

Fedora installation media can be downloaded free of charge as ISO images in various formats and variants . Before installation , the user burns the ISO image onto a writable CD-ROM or DVD . Alternatively, it is also possible (e.g. with the liveusb creator or the command dd ) to transfer an ISO image to a USB stick or a memory card and boot it .

The bootable DVD image contains the largest number of software packages. There is so-called live media for the individual spins , which contain a live system , but which can also be installed like the DVD . A network installation CD contains only a minimal Fedora system that just allows a computer to boot up and the installation to begin. All software packages to be installed are not installed from the CD, but rather downloaded from the Internet during installation.

There are vendors who deliver Fedora installation media by post for a small fee .

Applications

The software repository for Fedora 19 contained over 36,000 different packages that covered most of the applications and tools available for Linux. Only a fraction of it is included on the installation media. The standard installation contains a desktop environment and applications for common areas of application ( e-mail client, browser , Office package , image processing program , media player , etc.). Depending on the spin, different applications are installed as a standard selection, the KDE spin contains the Calligra Suite while some other spins contain LibreOffice as an office package. After the installation, the user can use the package manager to install any application from the software scope of the repository or from third-party sources.

Distribution-specific software

The Anaconda installer of Fedora 19 .
The system-config-servicestool used to manage the daemons on Fedora 19

The Anaconda installation routine enables a graphically guided installation of a Fedora system, while the Kickstart program can automate this, which is particularly helpful when installing multiple installations on company computers. The so-called - programs with graphical user interfaces are available to configure the system . The tools are programmed according to the usual Fedora principles. The principles demand that "management tools" (auxiliary programs for system administration) should only perform a single task in a targeted manner and do not require exclusive control over configuration files. As a result, administrators of a system are able to make any changes manually in configuration files despite these administration tools. system-config-*system-config-*

safety

Fedora fully integrated the kernel extension SELinux so as Mandatory Access Control to enforce system-wide. SELinux is activated by default after a Fedora installation and thus protects the system from a large number of threats. During the installation, which is firewall - Daemon firewalld furnished. The firewall prevents all external network connections to the system and only allows connections from the system to the outside.

On a newly installed Fedora system, SELinux and the firewall prevent the communication of all server services , for example Apache or Samba . Server services can only communicate with other systems after the SELinux and firewall rules have been adjusted by an administrator . The graphic tools system-config-selinuxand firewall-configare available for configuring SELinux and the firewall .

Package and software management

The graphical software management in a Fedora 19 system under KDE
DNF applies patches to a Fedora 22 system.

Fedora uses the RPM package manager developed by Red Hat to install packages and manage them locally. Dependencies between the packages are resolved with the help of package collections - so-called repositories - made available on the Internet with the program DNF (before Fedora 22 YUM ). On an already installed Fedora system, DNF is used to automatically apply patches and to keep the system up to date. The administrator can use DNF to install or remove additional software packages at any time. PackageKit and YumExtender (also known as yumex) are graphical user interfaces for DNF.

In the early days there was support for up2date and APT . Support for the latter was discontinued with Fedora Core 4 as development of APT-RPM was dormant. As of Fedora Core 5 , APT-RPM can be used again, since it has been able to access DNF repositories natively since then.

Official repositories

In Fedora, the official package sources of the Fedora project are set up by default. These contain all the packages maintained by the Fedora project. This includes repositories for patches (updates), experimental packages, source code packages and debug information .

Unofficial repositories

In addition to using the official repositories, the user has the option of configuring additional package sources from third-party providers.

The best-known source for additional software packages that are not included in the official package sources for ideological reasons with regard to the respective non-free licenses is RPM Fusion . There you will find, for example, patent protected multimedia codecs ( MP3 , MPEG ...) and proprietary graphics driver .

In addition, more and more software projects and companies such as Google , Skype or Adobe are making their own repositories available for Fedora.

Version update

Starting with Fedora 21 , the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade tool is available for upgrading to a more recent Fedora version and replaces the previously supported upgrade methods such as FedUp, PreUpgrade and Anaconda . As a first step, this DNF plugin loads all software packages of the next Fedora version onto the hard drive and then updates the system at the beginning of the next restart initiated under the control of the plugin.

EPEL

EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a repository maintained by the Fedora project that provides ported packages of software that are contained in Fedora itself, but not in RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux. Because these enterprise distributions are developed on the basis of Fedora, only very small adjustments to the packages are usually necessary. EPEL expands the enterprise distributions with applications and drivers that are not included there . Since the porting of packages from Fedora to the EPEL repository depends solely on the commitment of the community, neither Red Hat nor the Fedora Project give a guarantee, support or certification for such packages , as is usual for packages in the official RHEL repository.

history

Fedora.us

The fedora.us project was founded in November or December 2002 by Warren Togami . The goal was a quality RPM - repository for Red Hat Linux to create containing additional applications that were not included in RHL. The basic idea was: Official guidelines, but open to everyone. At first the project mainly dealt with rules for the package names. There were major problems with the coexistence of original Red Hat Linux and fedora.us packages. Among other things, the Fedora Naming Guidelines, which are still valid today, were created . However, the resources of the project were rather modest until the Fedora project was founded together with Red Hat. But fedora.us offered well-functioning structures and processes for a developer community.

Fedora Core

Fedora Core 1 desktop with KDE 3.1.4 and Mozilla Browser 1.4.1

On September 22, 2003, Red Hat announced that it would give up its own consumer Linux distribution in favor of a merger with the fedora.us project and continue it as a community project. Red Hat contributed the RHL source codes and a large workforce to the newly formed Fedora project. fedora.us brought a functioning online developer community into the Fedora project. On November 5, 2003, the Fedora Project released the first stable version of the new distribution under the name Fedora Core , which at that time was a direct development of the old Red Hat Linux 9 .

Legally sensitive software parts ( packages ) that came from the work of fedora.us have been removed from the Fedora repositories. The remaining parts of the distribution were split into the sub- projects Fedora Core and Fedora Extra . Fedora Core included all packages that were also included on the downloadable media (ISO images) of the first Fedora Core version. Fedora Extra contained packages that were not included in Fedora Core , but that complied with the Fedora Project's licensing guidelines to the same extent as the packages in Fedora Core . The third sub-project was Fedora Legacy . It was used to maintain Fedora versions that had been replaced by their successor version more than two to three months earlier. In Fedora Legacy , updates were only created and tested on the initiative of individual developers. The Fedora project itself only provided the infrastructure for it and declined any responsibility for the packages themselves.

Fedora Foundation

In 2005, Red Hat set up the Fedora Foundation, an independent foundation that was supposed to be responsible for the Fedora project. The aim of the foundation's project was to get more developers to work on the Fedora project, which should continue to be the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux . For this reason, Red Hat wanted to support the Fedora Foundation financially and technically. Since tax law would only have allowed Red Hat to support such a foundation within certain limits, Red Hat announced in April 2006 that the foundation would be dissolved again. Instead, the Fedora community should be more involved in the Fedora Board .

For Fedora Core is Fedora

In November 2006, major restructuring of the Fedora project was decided: The various repositories of Fedora Extra and Fedora Core were merged. Fedora Legacy has been discontinued without replacement and the name suffix Core has been dispensed with since version 7. The merged repository has also been called the Fedora Package Universe . In May 2008, Red Hat gave the majority of votes on the Fedora Board to the Fedora Community , which has since held the majority with 5 out of 9 votes.

Fedora celebrated its tenth anniversary on November 5, 2013.

Fedora.next

In August 2013, extensive restructuring of the Fedora project began under the name Fedora.next . Among other things, it was decided to work in five so-called "working groups" in future:

  • Workstation : The focus of this “working group” is on the use of Fedora on workstation computers .
  • Cloud: A cloud computing operating system is to be created on the basis of Fedora .
  • Server : The aim is to create a basis for various server applications.
  • Base: Maintains the kernel , the frameworks and APIs that are contained in all Fedora variants.
  • Env and Stacks: This “working group” takes care of e.g. B. the infrastructure of the Fedora project, the packing or the localization .

Fedora 21 is the first Fedora version that was created in the new structure. It contains one spin each especially for workstations, servers and cloud computing. In addition, however, there are still spins z. B. for KDE or Xfce. In order to be able to implement the restructuring without time pressure, it was decided not to publish Fedora 21 - as usual - half a year after Fedora 20, but only after about a year.

Versions

Even Red Hat Linux had special for his respective versions codename. This tradition continued. A list of these names and what they are all about can be found under Fedora and Red Hat version names . This series of names ended with Fedora 20.

version Code name publication Kernel annotation
Older version; no longer supported: 1 Yarrow November 5, 2003 2.4.19 First version, based directly on Red Hat Linux 9.
Older version; no longer supported: 2 Tettnang May 18, 2004 2.6.4 Instead of the previously common XFree86 , the X.Org server was used as the X server due to the license change in Fedora Core 2 . Fedora Core 2 was also one of the first distributions to integrate the then experimental SELinux . In Fedora Core 2, SELinux was still deactivated after the installation.
Older version; no longer supported: 3 Heidelberg November 8, 2004 2.6.9 In Fedora Core 3, SELinux became an integral part of the distribution and was activated after a standard installation. In addition, support for Indian languages and remote functions based on VPN have been improved.
Older version; no longer supported: 4th Stentz June 13, 2005 2.6.12 The most important innovations in Fedora Core 4 concerned the integration of Xen , GFS and Eclipse . The support of the PowerPC architecture was also new and OpenOffice.org was included in the then very fresh version 2.0. A uniform standard theme called “Clearlook” has been integrated for the desktop .
Older version; no longer supported: 5 Bordeaux March 20, 2006 2.6.16 After nine months of development, the Fedora version was released, which was the first to carry the Fedora logo. The Mono , which allows the development and execution of .NET applications in Fedora, was integrated after lengthy discussions about patent reservations. The graphical software management with Pirut and Pup has been integrated to simplify package management for beginners. The NetworkManager could now recognize and change WLANs independently . Five installation CD-ROMs were required to install Fedora Core 5.
Older version; no longer supported: 6th Zod October 24, 2006 2.6.18 New to Fedora Core 6 were a graphical management program for SELinux and a completely newly developed graphical printer management, which could make printers available in a plug-and-play process (without user intervention). The Compiz and AIGLX window managers allow graphic 3D effects.
Older version; no longer supported: 7th Moonshine May 31, 2007 2.6.21 In addition to the renunciation of the “Core” part of the name , the live media and spins available for the first time were the most significant innovation. KVM has been newly integrated and the PowerPC version supported the PlayStation 3 hardware. Various improvements related to the energy efficiency through the support of the then new sleep modes of the processors.
Older version; no longer supported: 8th Werewolf November 8, 2007 2.6.23 The new Java platform IcedTea and PulseAudio , which replaced the ESD daemon, have been integrated into Fedora 8 . KVM pushed Xen into second place. With the help of the Codeina program , the codecs for playing MP3 and other MPEG files from third-party sources have become easier to install. A new graphical tool for firewall configuration and PowerPC 64-bit support were also added.
Older version; no longer supported: 9 Sulfur May 13, 2008 2.6.25 To boot the system took over on Fedora 9 instead of SysVinit now Upstart . In addition to the x86, AMD64 and PowerPC variants, one was available for IA-64 , SPARC (32 and 64 bit). What was new was that the size of partitions could be changed during installation and that file systems could be encrypted during installation . The introduction of ext4 was also new . The KDE desktop environment, which was updated from version 3 to 4 and thus appeared in a completely new guise, took a big step.
Older version; no longer supported: 10 Cambridge November 25, 2008 2.6.27 In Fedora 10, KMS was built into the kernel, leading to the automation of the screen configuration. The graphical interface of the package management has been replaced by the cross-platform, also fished tool, PackageKit . Live media now also worked on USB sticks and what was visually very noticeable about Fedora 10 was the new development of the Plymouth program , which was responsible for the graphics during the boot process. For the first time, the NetworkManager offered the possibility of setting up so-called ad-hoc networks .
Older version; no longer supported: 11 Leonidas June 9, 2009 2.6.29 The boot time of Fedora 11 has been greatly optimized , with the aim of booting within 20 seconds on any hardware that was halfway up-to-date at the time. With Fedora 11, the s390x platform was supported for the first time. The free nouveau graphics driver was added to the distribution and ext4 replaced ext3 as the standard file system. KMS support now also worked with chipset- integrated graphics processors from Intel. To increase the security of the system, the use of NX bits was introduced throughout the system.
Older version; no longer supported: 12 Constantine November 17, 2009 2.6.31 For the first time it was possible to use the still experimental Btrfs . Hardware support for i586 has been cut, which means that Fedora requires at least an i686 capable processor. The YUM plug-in Presto made it possible to install delta RPM packages, which should greatly increase the speed for installing patches. The Moblin desktop environment, adapted for netbooks , has been added to the Fedora 12 software repository. The new audio mixer resolved the problems that had existed in previous versions of Fedora with the control of PulseAudio . Another new feature was the Automated Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) developed by Red Hat , which enables users to automatically report error messages and problems with SELinux to developers.
Older version; no longer supported: 13 Goddard May 25, 2010 2.6.33 In addition to various detailed improvements and updates, a Fedora version was available for the ARM platform for the first time. From Fedora 13 onwards, PackageKit can automatically install audio and video codecs from third-party sources as well as printer drivers. The Spin, called Sugar on a Stick , uses the student-oriented desktop environment Sugar , the OLPC-XO-1 project.
Older version; no longer supported: 14th Laughlin November 2, 2010 2.6.35 The remote technology SPICE based on KVM has been integrated into Fedora 14. A spin for Amazon's public cloud service EC2 was available with the release of Fedora 14.
Older version; no longer supported: 15th Lovelock May 24, 2011 2.6.38 In Fedora 15, the Gnome desktop environment was raised from version 2 to 3, which radically changed the look of the standard Fedora desktop. systemd replaced Upstart and monitored the system start and daemons . The side effect of systemd is a significantly shorter boot time. The system directory /var/run has been /runmoved to so that it is available earlier in the boot process. Oracle OpenOffice has been replaced by LibreOffice .
Older version; no longer supported: 16 Verne November 8, 2011 3.1 The existing boot loader was replaced by GRUB2 , which made booting on a UEFI system possible. The desktop environments LXDE and Xfce receive their own live media in Fedora 16 for the first time. The once removed administration tools for Xen have been added again. In addition to the Condor cloud server, various other applications and tools have been expanded to include cloud computing functions.
Older version; no longer supported: 17th Beefy Miracle May 29, 2012 3.3.4 As the first Linux distribution Fedora version 17 managed the system directories /lib, /lib64, /binand /sbin, and moved their content to /usr/*. Among other things, this should make it easier to take a snapshot of the system. This change to the file system, which does not correspond to the FHS , has now been reproduced by numerous other Linux distributions. The then new libvirt sandbox simplified the sandboxing of individual applications. ConsoleKit has been replaced by systemd-logind , which has taken care of user management on a Fedora installation ever since.
Older version; no longer supported: 18th Spherical Cow January 15, 2013 3.6.0

The biggest innovation in Fedora 18 was the completely redesigned Anaconda installer . Fedora 18 now supported Secure Boot and there was now a live medium for the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. The then new tool FedUp simplified the version change. With Samba 4 , Fedora was able to completely replace Windows servers as domain controllers. The firewalld daemon, which can manage a dynamic firewall configuration ( stateful packet inspection ), has now been responsible for network security . PackageKit can now also cache certain update packages and install them during the next system start, which is intended to reduce conflicts in the running system.

Older version; no longer supported: 19th Schrödinger's Cat 2nd of July 2013 3.9.0

From version 19 systemd takes care of the naming of network cards . Systemd was also able to replace the functions of the cron daemon . The Firstboot program has been replaced by various newly written Anaconda modules. For the first time, the ARM variant was released at the same time as the x86 and AMD64 variants. The PowerPC and System z variants followed, as usual, a few weeks later.

Older version; no longer supported: 20th Heisenbug 17th December 2013 3.11.10 Replacement of Rsyslog by the journal function systemd and the abandonment of Sendmail without replacement . The user interface Enlightenment 0.17 (E17), which has been optimized for low resource consumption , will also be included in Fedora for the first time.
Older version; no longer supported: 21st none December 9, 2014 3.17.4 Fedora 21 is the first Fedora version that was created in structures named after Fedora.next. It has a flavor each for workstations, servers and cloud computing. In addition, however, there are still spins z. B. for KDE or Xfce.

Fedora 21 is also the first version that has no code name.

Older version; no longer supported: 22nd May 26, 2015 4.0.4 Changeover to Plasma 5 in the KDE spin, new LXQt spin, changeover of the package manager from YUM to DNF , XFS is now the standard file system in the server edition.
Older version; no longer supported: 23 3rd November 2015 4.2.3 Support of Google Drive under Gnome. Open-source Radeon graphics drivers rely on OpenGL 4.1. Distribution upgrades are now handled by the standard package manager DNF via a plug-in . Firmware or BIOS updates are now offered just like normal program updates. KDE is used in version 5.4. New spin with Cinnamon in version 2.6. Python 3 replaces Python 2. Further security improvements, including the deactivation of SSL 3.0 and RC 4 in the GnuTLS and OpenSSL libraries .
Older version; no longer supported: 24 June 21, 2016 4.5 Thanks to Gnome version 3.20, version updates can now also be carried out using a graphical application, support for Flatpak packages, the standard compiler is GCC 6, as well as other software updates.
Older version; no longer supported: 25th 22nd November 2016 4.8.6 Wayland is set as standard, support for Flatpak, Gnome 3.22, support for listening to MP3 files, support for hybrid graphics cards.
Older version; no longer supported: 26th 11th July 2017 4.11.8 Gnome 3.24, Gnome now has a night mode, new program for partitioning the data carriers in Anaconda, LXQt is supported as the official user interface from this version, introduction of the MP3 encoder, because the patents on it have expired and Fedora does not use software with patents in principle , No X11 Synaptics driver, the Libinput input library is used as a replacement.
Older version; no longer supported: 27 November 14, 2017 4.13.11 Gnome 3.26, improved support for ARM64 boards like Raspberry Pi 3 or Pine 64. Support for S3TC , which is required by many games. Control panel has been restructured.
Older version; no longer supported: 28 1st May 2018 4.16.3 Gnome 3.28, Thunderbolt 3 security level support for the first time. Fedora no /rootlonger creates a directory during installation . As before, root rights can be obtained by command sudoor su -. Battery consumption in netbooks has been further reduced. On Intel Mobile Chipsets, Aggressive Link Power Management is used by default on SATA disks. This saves around 1.5 watts. Simplified use of VirtualBox by installing VirtualBox Guest Additions, which have the appropriate graphics card driver and kernel.
Older version; no longer supported: 29 October 30, 2018 4.18.16
Older version; no longer supported: 30th April 29, 2019 5.0.9
Older version; still supported: 31 October 29, 2019 5.3 Gnome 3.34, faster package installations, instead of Docker the drop-in replacement Podman is now included as an alternative. Use of Cgroups in the 2nd version so that processor time, memory consumption or the number of I / O operations are limited and the processes (and thus also containers or VMs) are set off. It is also the first version that no longer has a variant for 32-bit x86 hardware. However, 32-bit applications from third-party sources can still be executed because the 32-bit libraries required for this are still available.
Current version: 32 April 28, 2020 5.6.6 Gnome 3.36, the system should cope better with situations in the future thanks to EarlyOOM. The memory usage is checked. If the RAM becomes scarce and the system has to fall back on the swap memory, the new feature terminates the corresponding processes and prevents the system from freezing. In addition, the performance of the SSD has been improved by activating fs.trim by default.
Legend:
Older version; no longer supported
Older version; still supported
Current version
Current preliminary version
Future version

The Red Hat company develops the product Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from a Fedora version at regular intervals, with mostly only minor changes, the versions of which are maintained for a very long time in contrast to Fedora:

Development versions

The development work for Fedora is taking place on a distribution called Rawhide . All innovations for the Fedora version currently under development will be incorporated into this distribution and tested by the developers. Approaches the life cycle of the first alpha release, an upcoming release of Fedora, a is from Rawhide Branched (engl .: branched) called branch derived stabilized via the alpha- and beta-release phase and then with the final Release completed. The branched already bears the version number of the upcoming Fedora version. In parallel to Branched , Rawhide is being further developed for the next but one Fedora version.

In contrast to the branched , the Rawhide knows no versions, only daily rolling releases . Every day a service on a server of the Fedora project creates an installable ISO image from the source code of the rawhide and the branched . Since these releases, called nightly live builds , reflect the current state of development, major instabilities are to be expected. Loss of data or damage to hardware cannot be ruled out, which is why the Nightly live builds are unsuitable for any type of end user. It is also not uncommon for a nightly live build not to be possible, because temporary inconsistencies in the rawhide make this impossible.

For developers of software not included in the distribution and people who want to find out more, the nightly live builds of Rawhide and Branched are the easiest way to test and use the future Fedora before an alpha release or between alpha and beta releases .

Lineage and Derivatives

Fedora Core 1 was based on Red Hat Linux 9 (RHL) and was derived from it. Red Hat Linux itself has been completely integrated into Fedora Core and is no longer being developed independently. Instead, the company Red Hat sells the product Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the first versions of which are based on Red Hat Linux and the current versions on Fedora.

There are a number of Linux distributions that are built on top of Fedora or that are descended from the Red Hat distribution.

criticism

  • The "compulsion to update" after 13 months at the latest and the too frequent updates are criticized. Although this guarantees that the software is always up-to-date, it also involves many changes and long-term support is missing. It may be countered that RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux offer exactly this and that Fedora is therefore the wrong choice.
  • It is often emphasized that Fedora is not suitable for Linux beginners, because it is too complicated in certain areas, which the developers themselves assess differently.
  • In version 18 there was strong criticism of the revised installer, as it is sometimes very buggy and sometimes difficult to understand even for experts. In Fedora 26, the developers are replacing the controversial partitioning tool with the easier-to-use Blivet-gui.
  • The package management, consisting of RPM and YUM, is felt by some users to be slower than comparable systems. The developers countered this point of criticism by replacing YUM with DNF in version 22 of Fedora.

Fedora gallery

Each Fedora version is graphically designed to match the code name:

  • Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow)

  • Fedora Core 2 (Tettnang)

  • Fedora Core 3 (Heidelberg)

  • Fedora Core 4 (Stentz)

  • Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux)

  • Fedora Core 6 (Zod)

  • Fedora 7 (Moonshine)

  • Fedora 8 (werewolf)

  • Fedora 9 (Sulfur)

  • Fedora 10 (Cambridge)

  • Fedora 11 (Leonidas)

  • Fedora 12 (Constantine)

  • Fedora 13 (Goddard)

  • Fedora 14 (Laughlin)

  • Fedora 15 with KDE (Lovelock)

  • Fedora 16 (Verne)

  • Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)

  • Fedora 18 with KDE (Spherical Cow)

  • Fedora 18 with Mate (Spherical Cow)

  • Fedora 19 (Schrödinger's Cat)

  • Fedora 19 with KDE (Schrödinger's Cat)

  • Fedora 20 with KDE (Heisenbug)

  • Fedora 20 with Enlightenment (Heisenbug)

  • Fedora 21

  • Fedora 22

  • Fedora 23

  • Fedora 24

  • Fedora 25

  • Fedora 26

  • Fedora 27

  • Fedora 28

  • Fedora 29

  • Fedora 30

  • Fedora 31

See also

Portal: Free Software  - Overview of Wikipedia content on the subject of Free Software

Web links

Commons : Fedora  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

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This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 25, 2013 .