Here Comes Fedora 8

Fedora 8 was released on November 8, 2007. Every six months or so a new Fedora version is released. Fedora project is sponsored by Red Hat and is developed in collaboration with the community.

My computer was running on Fedora 6 from the past one year. I switched straight to Fedora 8 skipping Fedora 7. I did help few of my friends to install Fedora 7 though. Fedora 8 is bundled with new features - GNOME 2.20, Online Desktop, KDE 3.5.8, NetworkManager 0.7, PulseAudio, CodecBuddy, Compiz Fusion, IcedTea, Linux tickless kernel, Nodoka GNOME theme, graphical firewall configuration tool, Eclipse 3.3, numerous security enhancements and many more.

After downloading the Fedora 8 X86_64 torrent I burned the image to a DVD using GNOME baker, backed up my data and started the installation. The graphical installation aborted before creating user accounts with no useful error message. I had to use the text mode to install Fedora on my PC with AMD 64 bit processor and NVIDIA chipset. In all previous Fedora installations I could create user accounts before booting the operating system for the first time. I had to use the root account to create users and then login to the system. The default runlevel was set to 3 which left me with only the command line. I changed it to 5 by editing /etc/inittab file. When I logged into the system I saw big icons on the desktop which was caused by low screen resolution. Apart from these minor quirks everything else worked absolutely fine.

I installed the usual applications - Thunderbird, NVIDIA drivers from Livna, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash Player and few others. Then I imported my backed up data. I was all set.

The look and feel is impressive with Infinity and Nodoka GNOME theme which was created specially for Fedora. Compiz Fusion, the compositing window manager that re-merges Compiz and Beryl, was installed by default. I clicked System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects>Enable Desktop Effects and put a check mark next to "Windows Wobble when Moved" and "Workspaces on a Cube". The desktop transformed with great appearance and impressive effects.

Fedora 8 comes with GIMP 2.4, OpenOffice.org 2.3 and host of latest versions of free and open source software programs. Fedora also boasts of improvements in the Add/Remove Software tool - pirut, Pup and yum. You can now add repositories from the graphical interface. Fedora also includes several different spins. Spin is a combination of packages. You can either download a spin from Fedora website or roll your own using Pungi, LiveCD Creator, or Revisor.

All in all, Fedora is a fantastic GNU/Linux distribution.

• Visit the Fedora website at http://fedoraproject.org/
• Download Fedora from http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
• View the Fedora 8 release notes at http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/
• Join Fedora project at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join
• Join Fedora mailing lists - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate#head-e515a6e891efe6e2f1c8faa04...

Stay tuned.