Red Hat-sponsored, community-supported Linux could be best distro in town.

Like many computer administrators, I fear change.

I don't like upgrading my operating system. I prefer to let others debug things for me. Selfish? Perhaps, but even with this ethic in place, I enjoy trying out Linux distros. The new one on my laptop is Fedora Core.


A bit of Fedora Core history

After ditching the free version of its distro late last year, Red Hat has adopted Fedora as its "community" distribution. The company still offers a paid version of Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) for its enterprise customers.

To a lot of people Fedora Core is just like Red Hat 9.2, an evolution of Red Hat's distribution to keep up with changing technologies and packaging methods. The company has noted it will draw technology and techniques from Fedora, but that it's a wholly separate Linux distribution from Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Installing Fedora Core

It's very easy to perform a CD installation of Fedora Core on a machine running Red Hat 9. Take a trip over to LinuxISO.org, download the ISO images, and then burn them to a CD.

Once you boot from the CD, you can easily upgrade or install. You can choose any number of installation options and customize to your heart's content.

Best distro for peripheral support

Fedora Core supports the broadest range of devices I've found yet in a Linux distribution, with great coverage of USB printers, scanners, and other devices. It also includes the beginning stages of Bluetooth support. (That said, I haven't tested the Bluetooth stuff, as I have no Bluetooth devices.)

It also ships with Gnome 2.4, which comes with some very neat CD-burning and accessibility tools.

Installing and updating with Yum

The most important change for Fedora is how package management has evolved. Up2date, Red Hat's RPM-management service, is gone. It's been replaced by your choice of APT or Yum. We've covered the APT package manager before, so I'll likely show off Yum on the show.

Setting up Yum is easy. New users should visit Duke University's Yum site for help.

Using Yum, you can install just about anything you desire on the system, depending on the source of your Yum packages, including games, applications, servers, spam killers, and more.

Yum isn't just for Fedora Core. You can use Yum on any version of Red Hat, going back to version 7.2 or so. You can even use it to update older versions of Red Hat to Fedora Core. But keep in mind that, depending on your system configuration, it's a little more challenging.

I had very good luck updating both Red Hat 8 and Red Hat 9 boxes to Fedora Core, so I'm a Yum convert. APT is a very capable tool as well, so you should check out both if you're looking for an online package-management tool for Linux.

Too many options?

Fedora Core isn't perfect. Like far too many Linux distributions, it suffers from menu bloat -- lots of apparently redundant options for changing system settings. Having a choice is good, but I don't need three methods to change the screen size supported in the user interface. One method would be fine. But I'm not going to complain too much. I'd rather have more options than none at all.

I installed Fedora Core 1 on my laptop, but there's a test version of Fedora Core 2.0 now available. It's called Fedora Core 1.9 test, and it features the scary-fast 2.6.3 kernel. It's still very much a test; you might need to reinstall your previous distribution, and it's very difficult to back out of a system upgrade. It's worth trying, but not on a laptop.

Chris DiBona is co-founder of Damage Studios, a San Francisco-based game company. Damage Studios is working on Rekonstruction, which is billed as "the next-generation massively multiplayer online game." DiBona was formerly an editor for Slashdot and co-edited the book "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Software Revolution."