Fedora 7: Custom Spins with Revisor

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:01:00 -0400

This week we are diverging from the usual daily themes to present a Focus Week on Fedora 7.

This site, the Fedora Daily Package, is all about the software packages included in Fedora. The latest release of Fedora -- Fedora 7 -- introduces some significant improvements in packaging, including the merge of the Fedora Core and Fedora Extras repositories and the introduction of tools for creating custom distribution spins and live discs.

One of the biggest improvements that Fedora 7 brings is a change in the package repository structure. Previous releases of Fedora had separate Core and Extras repositories:

Core included packages that were 'on-disc' -- distributed on the ISO images -- and almost all of the packages were maintained by Red Hat employees.
Extras packages were not on the main ISO images. They were maintained by a mix of Red Hat and non-Red Hat community members.

Erasing the distinction between these two group of packages opened up the way for any community member to maintain any type of package. It also meant that the package set became too large to fit on a single-sided DVD. Rather than arbitrarily select a group of packages to go on disc, a set of tools was created which can take any set of packages -- including ones from third-party repositories -- and build a custom installation image or a live environment which can be booted and run entirely from optical or USB media.

Continue reading "Fedora 7: Custom Spins with Revisor"

Fedora 7: Installation

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 05:10:43 -0400

This week we are diverging from the usual daily themes to present a Focus Week on Fedora 7.

Fedora 7 offers more distribution and installation options than any previous version of Fedora.

The Fedora torrents and mirrors offer seven different Fedora DVD and CD images:

Name	Size	Description
Fedora 7 i386	2.8G	DVD image for installation on 32-bit PCs
Fedora 7 x86_64	3.4G	DVD image for installation on 64-bit PCs
Fedora 7 ppc	3.5G	DVD image for installation on POWER-based systems, including non-Intel Macs
Fedora 7 Live i686	701M	Live CD/DVD with Gnome for 32-bit PCs
Fedora 7 KDE Live i686	688M	Live CD/DVD with KDE for 32-bit PCs
Fedora 7 Live x86_64	781M	Live DVD with Gnome for 64-bit PCs
Fedora 7 KDE Live x86_64	833M	Live DVD with KDE for 64-bit PCs

The Live discs may be used to directly run Fedora without installing it, but they may also be used to perform a minimal installation to hard disk. This minimal installation will not include most server software or large desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org.

The actual Fedora 7 installation process is very similar to the Fedora 6 installation process. If you haven't performed a Fedora installation before, get the free Chapter 1 from my book Fedora Linux: A Complete Guide to Red Hat's Community Distribution on the O'Reilly web site (click the Sample Chapter link).

Network Installation

Many people would like to install Fedora 7 on a system without a working DVD drive. This is easily done using a network installation if you have another Linux system available on the network, as I wrote on the fedora-list yesterday:

Continue reading "Fedora 7: Installation"

Fedora Daily Package - Fedora 7 Week

Fedora 7: Custom Spins with Revisor

Fedora 7: Installation

Network Installation