Fedora 10 put to the test

After a short and unexpected delay, Fedora 10 was released at the end of November last year.

This Linux distribution arrived along with several other new versions of the major distributions: Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009, and most recently, in late December, Opensuse 11.1.

In the early days of Linux, distributions varied widely in what they offered and who they were aimed at, but today the list of what they have in common tends to be much longer than how they differ.

Ubuntu is the distribution people predicted Fedora would be. From its Red Hat roots, Fedora inherited a huge legacy, both in brand recognition and the installed base of earlier versions.

However, Fedora was most often viewed as a testbed for Red Hat’s commercial Enterprise offering and inspired little enthusiasm from the open-source community.

With Ubuntu’s easy-to-use approach, the excellent apt-based (Advanced Packaging Tool) software management system, and a polished and well-presented Gnome desktop, this distribution soon came to dominate the free Linux world.

In recent releases, Fedora has begun to fight back. Many of the new features included in Ubuntu releases are created by Fedora developers; this includes the popular NetworkManager and much of the PulseAudio sound system. Fedora has always been strong in development and has often been a little more cutting-edge and experimental with new software than other major distributions, and this continues to be the case.

What’s new?
The natural comparison for Fedora 10 is Ubuntu 8.10. Both are based on the same version of Gnome (2.24) and have the same kernel (2.6.27). To that end, on the surface they are indeed very similar.

Fedora does come out ahead of Ubuntu in some areas; for instance, the powerful office suite, Open Office, is at the newest version of 3.0 in Fedora, while Ubuntu lags behind with the slightly ageing 2.4 series.

Fedora has also worked considerably on PulseAudio, promoting a new ‘timer-based’ rewrite that provides much enhanced performance and lower power requirements. And sticking with multimedia, the desktop will now search available software repositories for required codecs, similar to Ubuntu, and offer to install any that are found.

Another area in which Fedora differs, and one that is instantly obvious, is the appearance of the desktop. Ubuntu has had little development in this area since its first release, while Fedora has gradually improved its look. The latest version has an attractive new theme, with a backdrop representing a solar flare.

The developers have also introduced a brand new feature, known as kernel mode switching, which moves some of the graphics control into the kernel instead of the X.org windowing software. On supported hardware this means a smooth progression from boot-up to the desktop, without any flickering. Although hardware support is currently fairly limited, it should improve with subsequent releases, and it is certainly a more polished way to start up the desktop.

Availability
Fedora 10 can be installed in a number of ways. The most popular is to install from a ‘live CD’, where you boot directly into the desktop from the CD and install from there. There are both Gnome and KDE versions available, for 32- and 64-bit architectures. The KDE disc, or ‘spin’ as it is known, provides a KDE 4.1 desktop, though I would not recommend this for general use yet. The standard Gnome spin installs a set of applications similar to Ubuntu 8.10’s live CD, although you receive the lightweight Abiword word processor instead of the full Open Office suite. This is due to space constraints on the CD.

Alternatively, you can download a DVD image that contains both desktops and a much larger range of applications. Installation by this method is almost identical, except rather than booting into the desktop, you boot straight into the graphical installation program alone. Another benefit of installing via the DVD is that you can download all available updates at the time of installation, so that these are installed and ready the first time you boot your newly installed system. Doing this simply requires the box marked ‘Fedora Updates’ in the installation screen to be ticked.