Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Tried out a new distribution: Fedora

I've used Fedora for the first time now. Like Ubuntu and Debian relationships, Fedora is a distribution that started after RedHat release 9 for home-users. RedHat sponsors Fedora heavily, but has put RedHat Enterprise Linux after the Fedora developments. So basically, the community is expected to innovate on the platform and RedHat sits around these developments, sponsoring Fedora where required and streaming those developments back into the enterprise product.

I'm now using a couple of Linux distro's actually. Some of the servers are running on CentOS, where CentOS is basically the opensource distribution of RHEL, as RedHat is required to release the software under the GPL license. So in a sense, CentOS == RHEL without the support contracts.

It's the first time I've been using SELinux as well. I can't say I'm truly happy about it, it's a bit invisible to the first-time user. I've managed to get things started ok and some nice things are coming out of Fedora, but I do think that Ubuntu support for many desktop tasks is slightly better. It's probably because of the widely visited Ubuntu forums. All-in-all, Ubuntu is slightly friendlier for using the platform, but Fedora has some great and innovative features and probably contains things I haven't even discovered yet.

From the software perspective, they seem to have more or less the same availability. RedHat systems use "yum" for package management though and Ubuntu (+Debian) use apt, that's the difference. Personally, I slightly prefer apt still. Install-wise, things are pretty easy nowadays. It all installs without a hitch.

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