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Self-imposed limitations and how to bypass them

With the exception of a few firmware files, Fedora 10, like its predecessors, consists exclusively of open source software released under a licence approved by the Fedora project; Licences that, for example, prohibit the software's use in a commercial environment or its sharing with third parties don't make it onto the list. The Fedora project also excludes software that is known to use patented technologies, as well as proprietary software and drivers. These measures are designed to protect commercial Fedora users and third party vendors who distribute Fedora separately, or together with hardware, from potential claims by copyright or patent holders.

As a result, Fedora's package repositories, which contain about 11,400 packages for the i386 architecture, don't include any of the popular commercial applications, the proprietary drivers by AMD or NVidia, or the software for playing back many popular audio and video formats. This even includes the support for MP3 playback, as the patent holders Sisvel are known to enforce MP3 copyright claims.

A Fedora 10 installation is, therefore, only truly operational once the package repositories that provide the software excluded by the Fedora project, as well as the necessary unsupported audio and video codecs have been activated. To avoid the problems that occasionally occur when mixing and matching different repositories, three of the most popular Fedora repositories – Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna – have recently merged to form the RPM Fusion project. After a prolonged development and test phase, this project officially announced the availability of its repositories last month and now also offers packages for Cambridge.

In Fedora 10, users don't even need to know which RPM package they have to retrieve from add-on repositories like RPM Fusion or alternative repositories like ATrpms for playing the popular audio and video formats. A suitable dialogue of a PackageKit plug-in appears automatically as soon as multimedia applications like Totem that are based on the Gstreamer framework encounter a file which requires an unsupported audio or video codec. The plug-in then searches the activated package repositories for RPM packages that contain the necessary Gstreamer plug-in, and the user can install them with only a few mouse clicks. Fedora 10 no longer installs the Codeina program (sometimes also called a codec buddy) for installing the proprietary Gstreamer plug-ins offered by Fluendo free of charge, or on a commercial basis. Introduced with Fedora 8, the program caused controversy from the start due to the Fedora project's focus on open source solutions.

What's new in Fedora 10

Slideshow, 5 images

In Fedora 10, the RPM Fusion package repositories can not only be activated after installing Fedora, but also already during installation; unlike previous versions of Fedora, Cambridge automatically includes some of the packages required for components like GNOME or KDE depending on which of the two desktops has been chosen. Because the RPM Fusion repositories are divided into a free and a nonfree section, open source-aware users can easily exclude software not released under a Fedora approved licence. In Fedora 10, open source purists can also simply uninstall the majority of the firmware supplied with the Linux kernel, which is now provided in a separate RPM package, to create a very lean and mean version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel.

RPM Fusion contains many, but by no means all, of the popular applications and drivers excluded by Fedora. Adobe Reader and the Adobe Flash plug-in, for example, are best obtained from the repository maintained by Adobe; Google also maintains its own repository, which contains components like Picasa and Google Earth. Other software components not included in Fedora and RPM Fusion can be found in third party repositories for Fedora, although mixing and matching these repositories frequently causes problems.

Conclusion

Like other Linux distributions with a six monthly development cycle, the new version of Fedora offers noticeably more current software and a large number of evolutionary improvements. With due consideration, however, upgrading from Fedora 9 to 10 is only worthwhile if there is an intention to actually use one of the new features. Users who wish to install Fedora from scratch, on the other hand, should definitely choose version ten, as it saves them the hassle of downloading the numerous updates for Fedora 9. A broadband internet connection is nevertheless advisable because the Fedora project is bound to release another host of updates for Cambridge; hundreds of new and updated packages were already available in the update repositories when the distribution was released.

Although Fedora 10 once again offers some improvements to make life easier for users and developers, Cambridge – like its predecessors – is not as suitable for first-time Linux users as, for example, the current versions of OpenSUSE or Ubuntu. This is mainly due to the self-imposed open source software limitations and a very cautious approach to software that may use patented or licensed technologies. On the other hand, the consistent stream of Fedora updates offers current programs and also considerably improves the distribution's hardware support – with other large distributions, new software and drivers are usually only included in new versions of the distribution. In addition, Fedora already offers a taste of new features like kernel-based mode-setting, glitch free audio with PulseAudio or connection sharing in the NetworkManager, which are also very likely to become part of other distributions in the near future.

(Thorsten Leemhuis thl)

Sources

Further information

• Fedora Homepage
• Release Notes
• Overview of the main innovations of Fedora 10
• Fedora 10 Install Guide
• Release Summary
• Feature List
• Common Fedora 10 bugs
• Ten Reasons to Get Fired Up Over Fedora 10, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

References:

• Get Fedora 10 Desktop Edition Now
• Download from BitTorrent
• Download from automatically allocated mirror
• List of all active mirrors

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