Fedora Linux
Preface
Fedora Linux A Complete Guide to Red Hat's Community DistributionThis book is written for experienced computer users, regardless of their previous experience with Linux. It covers both desktop and server configurations, and is ideally suited to an administrator or power user migrating to Fedora Linux from another environment, such as Windows, Mac OS X, or Unix.
This book is targeted at Fedora Core 6 but will also be useful to users of Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Core 7. Fedora is more than an operating system; it includes a wide range of applications, programming languages, and tools, and many of these packages are the subject of their own books. This book does not cover each topic in exhaustive detail; instead, it is designed to give you the most critical information in an accessible format and show you how the packages work within the context of Fedora.
At the time of writing, Fedora Core 6 was being finalized; my apologies for the inevitable little discrepancies between the screenshots and descriptions in this book and the final version of Fedora Core 6
How This Book Is Organized
How Do I Do That?
A description of techniques that may be used to accomplish the task or solve the problem
How Does It Work?
An explanation of how the solution and the underlying technology work
What About...
An exploration of related concepts and ideas
Where Can I Learn More?
Pointers to additional information if you want to dig into the topic in greater detail
The labs are grouped into 10 chapters:
Chapter 1, Quick Start: Installing Fedora
Covers the installation of Fedora Core using a variety of installation media and methods.
Chapter 2, Using Fedora on Your Desktop
Introduces the use of Fedora on the desktop, including the use and customization of the GNOME and KDE graphical user interfaces and the configuration of basic features such as the display and printing.
Chapter 3, Using Fedora on Your Notebook
Deals with the issues specific to using Fedora on a notebook computer, including power management, hopping between networks, and configuring external video for presentations.
Chapter 4, Basic System Management
Covers basic system management tasks, including user and group administration, file management, remote access, and service configuration.
Chapter 5, Package Management
Discusses package managementadding, removing, and updating softwareand shows you how to take advantage of the thousands of packages available through Fedora's software repositories.
Chapter 6, Storage Administration
Deals with storage administration using logical volume management and RAID arrays. It also covers data backup, including unattended overnight backups.
Chapter 7, Network Services
Is the server chapter. It covers the Samba file server (compatible with Windows systems), as well as DHCP, DNS, web, email, and print services. Web-based applications including Wikis and webmail round out the coverage.
Chapter 8, Securing Your System
Deals with security using Fedora's security facilities including SELinux,
but need commercial support, consider using RHEL, which is Red Hat's fully supported commercial Linux product.
1.1.1.4. Does your equipment meet Fedora's system requirements?
You can install a very basic version of Fedora Core without a graphical user interface on a system with as little as 64 MB of memory, 1 GB of disk space, and a processor speed of 200 MHz. However, this is not recommended for desktop usage.
1.1.2. How Does It Work?
source code binariesMost of these packages are developed and maintained by a team that may include developers, documentation writers, and testers, and most of the packages are not specific to Fedora; they're also distributed with other Linux distributions and non-Linux operating systems (for example, the excellent Firefox web browser is used on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and many other operating systems).
Each of these pieces of software is packaged for Fedora by another maintainer. To distinguish the two groups, the original developers and maintainers of the software are called the upstream maintainers , while the people responsible for integrating the package into Fedora are called Fedora maintainer s. The Fedora packages use the RPM package format for ease of management by package tools such as yum .
The current development version of Fedora is called Rawhide (see Lab 9.4, "Running Rawhide ") and is highly unstable; people using Rawhide expect a steady flow of changes, along with features that appear and disappear, and work and then stop working again. Rawhide serves as the testing and proving ground for the software that will become the next Fedora release.
A similar process is used for Fedora Core updates and Fedora Extras: software is released to a testing repository, where it is tested by volunteers on the bleeding edge, and once the bugs are worked out, the software is moved to the Fedora Core updates or Fedora Extras repository.