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Fedora

The Fedora Project: Open Source Evolved


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The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project. Formed in 2003 as a partnership between Red Hat and volunteer participants from around the world, the Fedora Project supports a growing and thriving open source community with thousands of project members.

Download Fedora 12

Fast Facts:

  • New releases of Fedora come out every six months

  • Fedora is free to copy, modify and redistribute without any cost and license fees

  • Red Hat is the primary sponsor for the Fedora Project and a major contributor

  • There are over 17,000 Fedora Account System members who have signed the Contributor License Agreement that allows them to edit and provide new code and content in Fedora.

  • Around 65% of Fedora's code is maintained by volunteers

  • Fedora serves as a community R+D lab, where ideas can be turned into reality quickly

  • Innovation through Fedora often forms the basis for many Red Hat open source projects

  • There are over 15,000 installable software packages in Fedora 12

Fedora 12: Get the Future First

Fedora 12's feature list includes:

  • Improved virtualization
  • Better virtual disk performance and storage recovery
  • Reduced memory consumption
  • Modern network booting infrastructure

Fedora 12 also features numerous desktop improvements that all users can see and experience including:

  • An updated Ogg Theora free video codec that works with Firefox 3.5.4 to provide high-quality, downloadable and streaming free media out of the box.
  • Enhanced support for mobile broadband, static, and shared connections
  • Space-saving software package downloads using better compression methods

Some of the many new features in Fedora 12 include:

  • Support for the Moblin Core desktop environment for small display machines
  • PackageKit plugins for automatic software installation from the command line, and support for package installation integrated with a website
  • Automatic bug reporting tool (Abrt) for sending crash information directly to the Bugzilla issue tracker
  • The libguestfs library and tools for working directly with virtual guest disk images without booting the virtual guest machine
  • SystemTap 1.0 with improvements for easier application and kernel debugging and tracing and integration with the popular Eclipse IDE
  • The improved NetBeans 6.7.1 development environment for Java programmers
  • Optimizations for current 32-bit processors including Atom

For a more complete list of Fedora 12 features, refer to the Fedora community's release announcement.

Fedora FAQs


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How can Fedora give away all of the code that people have contributed?

There are over 17,000 Fedora contributors that have signed the Contributor License which is an agreement that allows them to contribute to the Fedora Project. Further, all code and content produced in the Project is provided under a free and open source software license that preserves users' rights to copy, distribute and make derivative works.

What benefit does a contributor gain from participating in the Fedora community?

There are multiple benefits, and individual contributors sometimes realize very different individual benefits through their involvement. One major benefit contributors often cite is in the act of collaborating itself. Fedora community members enjoy working on new features, solving problems and interacting with other folks that share a common interest. Because Fedora is an open and transparent project, it also provides a way for people to demonstrate their skills at work to potential partners, customers, or employers.

Why such a short development cycle?

The development cycle is purposely restricted to six months to encourage rapid innovation and collaboration between thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide. Six months gives us the best balance between providing the latest software with the quality that users expect from a release.

Where can I learn more?

For more information on Fedora 12, to download the distribution or to join this community effort, please visit http://fedoraproject.org/.