Linux® Bible, 2008 Edition: Boot Up to Ubuntu®, Fedora®, KNOPPIX, Debian®, openSUSE®, and 11 Other Distributions

Chapter 8. Running Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Digging into Fedora

• Going forward with Fedora

• Installing Fedora

In September 2003, the world's leading Linux distribution, Red Hat Linux, disappeared.

Red Hat, Inc., the company that created Red Hat Linux, divided its development efforts in two directions: the Fedora Project, which produces the Fedora operating system (originally called Fedora Core), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The split came from trying to better serve two diverse groups with one operating system. Fedora focused on encouraging the open source development community interested in helping develop and test software that would one day go into Red Hat products. Red Hat Enterprise Linux focused on the needs of paying customers who needed enterprise computing solutions.

Note

Fedora 8 is included on the DVD that comes with this book. You can install the entire Fedora 8 prime DVD, from this DVD, using descriptions in Appendix A and the "Installing Fedora" section later in this chapter. If you don't have a DVD drive, you can obtain the same software on CDs by downloading them from the Internet (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download) and burning them to CD, as described in Appendix A.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux both come from a base of code that stems from the Red Hat Linux legacy. The two distributions have different goals and audiences and may drift farther apart over time. For the time being, however, Fedora includes features being developed ...