The usually unavoidable extensions

Like previous versions, with the exception of a few firmware files, Fedora 11 consists solely of open source software released under open source licenses recognised by the Fedora project; licenses which forbid use in commercial environments or distribution by third parties don’t make it onto their list. The Fedora project also excludes software which uses technologies known to be patented.

This should protect users who use Fedora commercially, or third parties who wish to market the Linux distribution separately or in conjunction with hardware, from any claims for copyright or patent infringement. As a result, however, Fedora 11 is missing many popular, proprietary Linux applications and drivers. This approach also leaves the distribution unable to play many popular audio and video formats, including MP3s, as patent exploitation company Sisvel is known to assert claims on behalf of the owners of the rights to MP3.

A Fedora 11 installation is therefore only really ready to go after activating the appropriate package repositories and installing the required omitted software and 'problem' audio and video codecs. The best known and most popular repository for Fedora is probably RPM Fusion, which was created from the merger of Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna last year. It can not only be activated directly after installing Fedora, it can also be activated during installation from DVD. PackageKit will install plug-ins on request if after configuring RPM Fusion, a Gstreamer-based application such as Totem requires a plug-in which is not in Fedora but is available from RPM Fusion. Fedora uses the xine-lib Xine library under KDE – installing the xine-lib-extras-freeworld RPM Fusion package adds support for problem multimedia formats.

RPM Fusion offers many of the popular applications and drivers ignored by Fedora, but by no means all. The best way of getting hold of Adobe Reader and the Adobe Flash plug-in remains Adobe's own package repository; Google also maintains its own repository, from which users can get hold of Picasa and Google Earth. Software not included in either Fedora or RPM Fusion can be found in other Fedora package repositories.

Further information

Extensive further information can be found on the Fedora website. There is also the Fedora 11 Install Guide, a list of known problems in Fedora 11 and an FAQ available..

The Fedora 11 tour includes many screen shots and a video illustrating the Plymouth-animated boot process. The Fedora 11 talking points go into more detail on some of the major features. Of more interest to Fedora developers and users interested in the technical side are the new features pages, which are used for a variety of purposes during the Fedora 11 development process and provide background information.

The developers of PackageKit, Kernel Mode Setting and Presto discuss some of the changes in a series of podcasts. There are also podcasts from Fedora Engineering Manager Tom 'Spot' Callaway and Fedora Release Engineer Jesse Keating. If you prefer the written to the spoken form, the wiki includes interviews with developers who have worked on PulseAudio and finger print sensor support in Fedora 11. A blog entry by Fedora and GNOME developer David Zeuthen explains some of the new functionality offered by DeviceKit.