Tag Archives: fedora

Kororaa 15.1 (Squirt) released

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The second release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released. Version 15.1 is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

This release includes a number of fixes and enhancements, as listed below. A special thanks to Prashanth for the review of Kororaa 15 which outlined many of these shortcomings.

Major changes:

  • Fixed KDE crash in live mode (prelink wasn’t properly disabled)
  • Fixed Kdenlive bug which stopped it from running
  • Fixed KPackagekit crash in live mode
  • Bypass the login screen and load straight to desktop
  • Disable screensaver and locked screen in live mode
  • Renamed desktop switcher to “Switch between Shell and Fallback desktops”
  • Added Google Talk Plugin repo for easy installation
  • Added a wrapper package (skype-helper) for Skype dependencies (can’t ship Skype though)
  • Added more GNOME Shell themes
  • Removed Gloobus preview (not complete in Fedora)
  • Removed GNOME Appearance Properties link (deprecated in GNOME 3)
  • Removed Synaptic package manager
  • Removed Miro (currently broken upstream)
  • Updated to Firefox 7
  • Updated to Openshot 1.4

Kororaa 15.1 comes with an RPM metapackage to install and configure Adobe Flash, now that Add/Remove Extras is gone. To get flash, install the flash-plugin-helper package. To remove flash, uninstall the flash-plugin package.

Kororaa 15.1 also comes with an RPM metapackage to install the dependencies for Skype (but not Skype itself). Simply install the skype-helper package, then download the Skype package for Fedora from their website and install using the package manager.

Upgrade
Existing Kororaa 15 users need not upgrade to 15.1 as these changes mostly affect live mode, while others have been pushed out via system updates.

Users still on Kororaa 14 may wish to upgrade to 15.1 and should do so via a new install (backup your data if necessary). Users who wish to stay with GNOME 2.x should not upgrade to 15.1, as it comes with GNOME 3. However, Kororaa 15.1 does include a desktop switcher for GNOME 3, so that users can switch between the new Shell interface and the 2.x style Fallback mode using the “Switch between Shell and Fallback desktops” link on the desktop.

Desktops
The GNOME 3 desktop has a custom theme available, as well as several extensions to provide an enhanced user experience (and help ease the transition from GNOME 2.x). It also comes with the GNOME Tweak Tool to allow further customisation.
Kororaa 15 desktop - GNOME

The KDE desktop has a custom layout with specific default applications, such as Firefox for the web and VLC for media, etc. It now also comes with Linphone for those wanting a SIP client.
Kororaa 15 desktop - KDE

Features
Derived from Fedora 151, this updated release comes with the usual Kororaa extras out of the box, such as:

  • Tweaked KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3 base systems
  • Third party repositories (Adobe, Chrome, RPMFusion, VirtualBox)
  • Firefox 7 as the default web browser (with integration tweaks for KDE)
  • Firefox extensions included (Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Flashblock, Xclear)
  • Microblogging client (Choqok for KDE, Gwibber for GNOME)
  • Full multimedia support (excluding Flash, see next)
  • Installer for Adobe Flash plugin
  • Jockey device manager to handle drivers such as AMD/ATI and NVIDIA
  • Video editor (Kdenlive for KDE, OpenShot for GNOME)
  • VLC as the default media player
  • SELinux enabled (particularly worthwhile for Flash)
  • English (Australian/British) support & dictionaries
  • and more..

Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today and let us know! 🙂

Thanks!

Note: Kororaa is not provided or supported by the Fedora Project. Official, unmodified Fedora software is available through the Fedora Project website.

Kororaa 15 (Squirt) released

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The first stable release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

This release includes Ubuntu’s Jockey Device Driver manager, which has replaced the Add/Remove Extras script for configuring third party drivers (such as nvidia). While I am still working on the port of Jockey to Yum, in order to release Kororaa 15 now (already a month later than I was hoping) I am using Jockey packages created by fellow Fedora Remix, Parsidora, so thanks and kudos to them!

Kororaa 15 comes with an RPM metapackage to install and configure Adobe Flash, now that Add/Remove Extras is gone. To get flash, install the flash-plugin-helper package. To remove flash, uninstall the flash-plugin package.

Upgrade
Users still on Kororaa 14 may wish to upgrade to 15 and should do so via a new install (backup your data if necessary). Users who wish to stay with GNOME 2.x should not upgrade to 15, as it comes with GNOME 3. However, Kororaa 15 does include a desktop switcher for GNOME 3, so that users can switch between the new Shell interface and the 2.x style Fallback mode.

Desktops
The GNOME 3 desktop has a custom theme available, as well as several extensions to provide an enhanced user experience (and help ease the transition from GNOME 2.x). It also comes with the GNOME Tweak Tool to allow further customisation.
Kororaa 15 desktop - GNOME

The KDE desktop has a custom layout with specific default applications, such as Firefox for the web and VLC for media, etc. It now also comes with Linphone for those wanting a SIP client.
Kororaa 15 desktop - KDE

Features
Derived from Fedora 151, this updated release comes with the usual Kororaa extras out of the box, such as:

  • Tweaked KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3 base systems
  • Third party repositories (Adobe, Chrome, RPMFusion, VirtualBox)
  • Firefox 6 as the default web browser (with integration tweaks for KDE)
  • Firefox extensions included (Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Flashblock, Xclear)
  • Microblogging client (Choqok for KDE, Gwibber for GNOME)
  • Full multimedia support (excluding Flash, see next)
  • Installer for Adobe Flash plugin
  • Jockey device manager to handle drivers such as AMD/ATI and NVIDIA
  • Video editor (Kdenlive for KDE, OpenShot for GNOME)
  • VLC as the default media player
  • SELinux enabled (particularly worthwhile for Flash)
  • English (Australian/British) support & dictionaries
  • and more..

Major changes:

  • Add/Remove Extras script removed by default (still in repository)
  • Jockey device driver manager added
  • New Flash plugin RPM metapackage installer
  • New DownThemAll download manager addon for Firefox
  • Linphone VoIP client for KDE added
  • GNOME 3 switcher between Shell and Fallback desktops
  • Pidgin replaced with Empathy for better GNOME integration
  • KSplice has been removed by default

Feedback
We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today and let us know! 🙂

Thanks!

Note: Kororaa is not provided or supported by the Fedora Project. Official, unmodified Fedora software is available through the Fedora Project website.

Jockey device manager port for Fedora (using Yum)

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One of the things I wanted to do for Kororaa was make Ubuntu’s Jockey device manager work. This would replace my current dodgy script and provide a mechanism for extending support for other devices over time (if needed). I’ve put my code on github if you want to check it out.

It wasn’t meant to be a joke, but on the 1st April this year I contacted Martin Pitt (the Jockey project lead) to pitch the idea. He helpfully replied saying that they’d written Jockey to be pretty vendor agnostic and that he had already discussed the idea of porting it to Fedora with Jon Masters. Indeed, he had did have the test suite working on Fedora 12 already (using PackageKit).

So I started out trying to understand the code and seeing what was possible. The core of the work is in oslib.py which implements the package management side of things (the default code uses PackageKit). Ubuntu has their own apt implementation, so I wanted to make a native Yum implementation.

There is some detection code (which shouldn’t need to be touched) and then there are the handlers for each device you want to manage (nvidia, etc).

A few weekends ago, Jason Nielsen and I got together to work on the code. In a few hours we had ported oslib.py to Yum, so I think the majority of the work there is done (thanks for your help, Jason!). It’s a much cleaner implementation than running PackageKit and parsing the results, because Yum is written in Python 🙂

That’s where it’s at now. Next I need to create some handlers and then begin some testing. I’m holding off on the next Kororaa release, because I want to get this working before I ship it. Longer-term this naturally won’t go into Fedora, but perhaps into RPMFusion.

Parsidora (another Fedora Remix) has also been working on Jockey, but using the PackageKit implementation (I’ve sent them a message to see if they are interested in the native Yum version). You can try their existing implementation for Fedora 15 if you’re interested.

Hopefully I’ll have everything ready for Kororaa in the next few weeks, before Fedora 16 comes out! 🙂

How to install and run VirtualBox on Fedora (and Kororaa)

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Kevin on the Kororaa Forums asked a question about VirtualBox and why it needs kernel modules.

Just wondering if someone could give me an idea of what Kernel Modules are and what they do in relation to Virtual Box? Every time I try to install VB it says you need “this” or “that” (mostly kernel modules) and I have no idea where to look, what they are, and what they do, so I am hoping to learn something. Also, if I get VB to work, and “they” update the kernel, do I have to add modules again or? Basically when I install VB, what do I have to install along side it?

Here’s my reply, as it might be useful for anyone running Fedora (note, this is using the latest package from Oracle, rather than the pre-compiled OSE in the Fedora repos).

Background
So your operating system is made up of three (main) components:

  • Physical hardware (computer bits)
  • Kernel (software which talks to your hardware and makes it work, think drivers)
  • Software (talks to your kernel to get to your hardware)

Your kernel is what makes your computer work (this is actually what Linux is, a kernel) and it’s actually the most important part of the operating system. When you’re talking about VirtualBox, it needs to create fake hardware on top of your real hardware, so to do that, it needs a driver. Drivers sit in the kernel layer.

The Linux kernel has thousands of drivers in it, but it does not have VirtualBox drivers in it (yet). This means you need to compile these and load them into your running kernel of you want to use VirtualBox. Once you do that, your kernel will have the fake hardware that the VirtualBox software needs to run. Drivers which you can load and unload into the kernel are called modules.

The VirtualBox host computer needs these drivers, but the VirtualBox guest also needs some drivers to make full use of the fake hardware. When you install Linux or Windows as a VirtualBox guest, the hardware is fake, so that OS needs drivers too! Some of those drivers (like audio and network) are already in the Linux kernel, so if your guest is running Linux, you just need drivers for the video, etc.

Requirements
In order to compile the drivers for VirtualBox (on both host and guest) on Linux you need some development libraries, compiler program (such as GCC), as well as the headers for the running kernel. You need the headers because you need to compile a driver to load into the kernel and it needs to know detailed information about it.

Fortunately, if you’re using Kororaa, all of the required tools and packages are already installed! 🙂 All you need to do is build the drivers.

If you’re running a vanilla instance of Fedora, then you need to install the build tools like so:
su -c 'yum install gcc kernel-devel'

Now you have the build tools required to compile the drivers.

Automatically building drivers after kernel update
Modules are for a specific kernel and so when you get a kernel update, you need to re-compile the drivers for VirtualBox hosts and guests. Fortunately, there’s a neat little package called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework) which will do this for you automatically – and of course Kororaa comes with this pre-installed.

If you’re running Fedora, you can easily install it like so:
su -c 'yum install dkms time'

When you install VirtualBox (see below), it will register the drivers with DKMS and on boot it will re-compile them for you, if it needs to. So, you just need to do it once and forget! Any updates to VirtualBox that are pulled in will also be automatically updated.

Building drivers on the host
Because Kororaa has all of the requirements for VirtualBox (including the package repository), all you need to do to get VirtualBox up and running is to install it using the package manager. If you prefer, you can install it manually like so (note the version is currently 4.1):
sudo yum install VirtualBox-4.1

Again, if you’re using vanilla Fedora, then you need to grab the VirtualBox repository file so that you can install VirtualBox from the Oracle repository (the packaged version from Fedora is usually a few versions behind).
su -c 'wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo'

Now you can install VirtualBox on Fedora:
su -c 'yum install VirtualBox-4.1'

You should see something like this during the install process:
No precompiled module for this kernel found -- trying to build one.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules [ OK ]
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS [ OK ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]

As you can see, the modules were successfully compiled and registered with DKMS for future automatic compilation.

Group permissions
Just remember that any user who wants to run and use VirtualBox on the host needs to be in the vboxusers group. You can use the users graphical tool to do this (system-config-users), or add them to the group by running the command (substitute chris with your username):
sudo gpasswd -a chris vboxusers

Then just run VirtualBox and away you go!

Building drivers on the guest
Once you have your host up and your guest operating system installed, the way to install the required drivers is using the built in method. Once you have booted your guest operating system, simply click the Devices menu at the top, and click Install Guest Addons.

Install Guest Addons
This will load a CD in your guest and you can run the autorun.sh script from the disk, which will ask you for the root password and then detect your operating system and compile the drivers for you.

Run Guest Addons
Once again, if your guest is running Kororaa too, then you already have the required build tools and libraries. If not, you will need to install them first – how this is done depends on your distro (for Fedora, see above).

Remember, with DKMS you will automatically get updated drivers this way after a kernel update.

That’s it! Just reboot your guest and away you go.

Kororaa 15 (Squirt) Beta 2 released

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The second beta release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

This release fixes the black screen issue that some users were reporting, as well as having the desktop theme customisations for KDE (as well as GNOME) correctly applied. The usual Kororaa goodies apply.

The GNOME 3 desktop has a custom theme applied, as well as several extensions to provide an enhanced user experience.
Kororaa 15 Beta desktop - GNOME

The KDE desktop has a custom layout with specific default applications, such as Firefox for the web and VLC for media.
Kororaa 15 Beta desktop - KDE

Derived from Fedora 151, this updated release comes with the usual Kororaa extras out of the box, such as:

  • Tweaked KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3 base systems
  • Third party repositories (Adobe, Chrome, RPMFusion, VirtualBox)
  • Firefox 5 as the default web browser (with integration tweaks for KDE)
  • Firefox extensions included (Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Xclear)
  • Microblogging client (Choqok for KDE, Gwibber for GNOME)
  • Full multimedia support (excluding Flash, see next)
  • Installer for Adobe Flash, AMD/ATI and NVIDIA video drivers
  • Video editor (Kdenlive for KDE, OpenShot for GNOME)
  • VLC as the default media player
  • KSplice, for rebootless kernel updates
  • SELinux enabled (particularly worthwhile for Flash)
  • English (Australian/British) support & dictionaries
  • and more..

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed the black screen issue
  • Applied custom desktop changes in KDE and 32bit GNOME

Known issues

  • Nothing reported yet..

We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today and let us know! 🙂

Thanks!

Note: Kororaa is not provided or supported by the Fedora Project. Official, unmodified Fedora software is available through the Fedora Project website.

Kororaa 14 (Nemo) Beta 5 released

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Kororaa 14 (Nemo) Beta 5 has been released for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE and GNOME. If you’ve been waiting to try out Kororaa, this is the version to test!

Kororaa 14 (Nemo) GNOME desktop

I have finally packaged up all of the system changes we make, into RPMs in the Kororaa repository. This means future changes can be pushed out via updates – theoretically, no need to re-install when the new release comes out (unless you want to).

This version is recommended for all new installs. For existing installations, you can update get these changes by installing the following packages:
sudo yum install kororaa*

New features:

  • Update to Firefox 4 by default for KDE and GNOME
  • Packaged all Kororaa system changes into RPM repository

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed missing dictionaries in LibreOffice

We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today! 🙂

Thanks!

On becoming a Fedora maintainer

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Recently, Rahul Sandaram (Fedora dev and creator of the Omega Fedora Remix) offered to sponsor me to become a Fedora maintainer, which I accepted. A day or so later I pushed my first updates into Fedora for deja-dup – the package I now co-maintain while I learn the ropes.

Previously, one would become a maintainer by first submitting a new package and thereby overtime demonstrating an understanding of the Fedora packaging process and guidelines. However recently a new system was approved whereby one could become a co-maintainer of an existing package, instead. This requires being sponsored by an existing maintainer, which Rahul was for me.

It’s quite a big task, but Rahul was very helpful and patient while I learned about the process. There is a lot of information on the Fedora Wiki but I found there wasn’t really a single place which provided a nice overview, broke down each section in detail, and then explained all the steps required. So that (along with my cautious nature) meant it took a dozen or so clarifying emails back and forth between Rahul and myself.

When I got my first understanding and taste of the system though, I’ve gotta say, I was quite impressed. The scale of the system and architecture and how it all works is amazing. The build files (RPM spec files) of all the packages in Fedora are kept under their own git repository. Hooks into this git system and special build tools manage the whole process. All in all, this automation makes it quite seamless.

So after reading and doing everything Rahul sent to me, I started on my journey.

There are two development systems to update now – rawhide (development tree) and F15 (the upcoming version). I wanted to update both of these to the latest upstream version, 17.90. I also wanted to update the stable Fedora 14 package to an upstream bug-fix release, version 16.1.1.

Cloning deja-dup from the git repo put me in the rawhide branch by default. I updated the spec file – increasing the version, adding python-cloudfiles as a new dependency, and putting in a detailed changelog. I then committed that to my local git repo with a comment linking to upstream. I then pulled those changes from rawhide into the f15 branch and updated f14.

commit bb1a5daa9feea74640fd84a0174e74e4e83ad34b
Author: Christopher Smart
Date: Sat Mar 5 21:23:07 2011 +1100
    
     Updated to upstream bugfix version 16.1.1.
     "This release fixes a bug in the just-released 16.1 that caused help
     documentation to not be translated."
     https://launchpad.net/deja-dup/+announcement/7239

Next I needed to test these packages, so I built a source RPM from the spec for each version. I discovered that one can either do a mock build on their local machine, or use Koji to do a scratch build on Fedora’s online build system. I did both, which worked well.

Using Koji meant I needed to first push my changes back to Fedora first though (or so I thought), so I was hesitant to do it without first checking with Rahul. This was the sort of thing that was emailed back and forth – I didn’t fully understand the system and didn’t want to break anything! For example, in order to test my F14 update I had to push back to the git repo – but what if I made a mistake in the process? Would my build on Koji push this broken package onto everyone’s system?

Fortunately, no. Once all the updating of the spec file and building is complete, the maintainer has to formally submit it into the update process before anything will happen. In addition, each package must then pass approval by other maintainers before it is approved and pushed out. You can see why it took some back and forth between Rahul and myself – I wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to do some damage 🙂

Along the way I discovered new automated ways of doing things, such as validating a spec file, automatically downloading the source tarball to update the spec file, then uploading it to the Fedora build system.

In the end though, I think that I have a pretty good grasp of the overall process and am quite excited by the prospect of becoming a Fedora maintainer. I’m hoping that deja-dup comes out with a new update soon, so that I can do another update!

I’m still a little hesitant to go and change things – I don’t want to do the wrong thing or step on anyone’s toes. I did however create my own page on the Fedora Wiki, complete with a hackergotchi, of course.

So once again, thanks to Rahul for his patience and guidance 🙂

Kororaa 14 (Nemo) Beta3 released

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Kororaa 14 (Nemo) Beta3 has been released for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE and GNOME.

It is recommended to back up your data and perform a fresh install as this fixes several important bugs.

New features:

  • Latest packages including updated kernel, latest KDE, and GNOME
  • Added Kdenlive video editor to KDE
  • Added HandBrake ripper
  • Set previews for various file types in Dolphin (KDE)
  • Added Fedora printer configuration tool to KDE
  • Added deja-dup backup tool
  • Replaced PiTiVi with OpenShot in GNOME
  • Fixed Elementary theme issue under Nautilus in GNOME
  • PolicyKit tweaks for printing, should be seamless (please test!)

Bug fixes:

  • Lots 🙂
  • Problem with new users being added to wheel group
  • Dropped Livna repository due to unreliability
  • Fixed bugs in add-removes-extras script

We’d love to hear your feedback on the forums, so download it today! 🙂

Thanks!

Kororaa Beta2 released – new GNOME version, KSplice, LibreOffice

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Kororaa 14 (Nemo) Beta2 has been released for download.

This release includes several fixes, updates to all your favourite applications, as well as the following major changes:

Download it today! 🙂

-c

Why Kororaa is (now) derived from Fedora

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You might be wondering why I chose to derive Kororaa from Fedora. Perhaps you have used Fedora in the past yourself and been burnt, or perhaps (like I used to) you can’t stand Yum, Fedora’s package manager. Perhaps you even hate RPMs?

Well let me say, I understand!

Let me also say, that I think you should give Fedora another chance (like I did), or at least continue reading this post 🙂

All distros are different and they have different goals. However, I’m drawn to Fedora for several reasons including the fact that at its heart, Fedora is about building a community of contributors, not just consumers.

Relationship with Red Hat
Fedora is a community operating system, whose major commercial sponsor is Red Hat. Many Red Hat engineers work on free software projects (see Upstream below) and Fedora provides a platform to push those changes to a large audience. While there is a small team of Red Hat engineers dedicated to working on Fedora, it remains primarily a community driven project.

Values
Fedora has a great set of values, which embody the very heart of the community; Freedom, Friends, Features, First. A central goal for Fedora is advancing free software and content freedom.

In particular, I admire Fedora’s strong support of freedom. This means that they do not ship (nor support) proprietary software, but naturally prefer (and create where necessary) free software alternatives. For example, instead of building tools to help install NVIDIA drivers Fedora invested in Nouveau, the free 3D driver for NVIDIA cards. This not only keeps Fedora free to re-distribute, but it benefits the whole Linux community. That’s extremely admirable, in my opinion.

That’s not to say that you can’t get the NVIDIA drivers, or other proprietary software for your system. Various third party repositories, such as RPMFusion, exist for this very purpose (and of course, Kororaa configures all this for you out of the box!).

Package Management
Yum (and RPM) have made leaps and bounds over the last few years and I actually quite enjoy using it now (and it’s quite fast!). Having said that, most package commands are run through PackageKit these days. As for RPMs themselves, they’re just a binary package format like Debs – it’s the package manager that makes the difference.

Download an RPM from the net and you can install it with Yum (or via the GUI using PackageKit), which will automatically pull in any dependencies for you. You rarely use the rpm command, like in Debian and Ubuntu you rarely use dpkg.

Security updates
Yum has a very handy feature, namely the ability to list and install only security related updates. It’s as simple as:
yum --security update

If that wasn’t useful enough, you can also install an update which fixes a specific bug. You can get a list of all updates and their bugzilla numbers with:
yum list-sec bugzillas

Now, once you have the update to fix that specific bug, you can install it using the bugzilla number from the list above.
yum --bz 650995 update

You can also combine the security option with bugzilla:
yum --security list-sec bugzillas

How powerful is that?!

Groups
Fedora also has a wonderful addition, called groups. After some educational software, office programs, or support for your language? It’s easy, just install the group you need, like so:
yum groupinstall "Educational Software"

If you’re a developer, getting started with Fedora is easy. Just install the development group you need, such as GNOME, KDE, Java, Kernel, Perl, or even the Web.
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

There are almost 200 groups, ready to make your life easier!

Community repos
Fedora also has several contributor repositories available for end users. This is sort-of similar to Ubuntu’s PPA (Personal Package Archive). However, Fedora often provides updates for major packages, so you don’t actually need to add a separate repository to get the latest version of things like KDE.

Apt fall-back
If that’s still not enough, you can also install Debian’s Apt package manager and other graphical front-ends like Synaptic in Fedora!

Updates
Similar to other non-rolling release distros, Fedora generally only applies bug fixes to a stable release, rather than introducing new features with later versions.

Having said that, Fedora does often provide major updates to some specific programs, including KDE. In general, I have found that often packages like Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the Linux kernel itself get major updates. So, with Fedora you are not left behind quite as much, nor having to add repositories for unofficial builds. I like that 🙂

Innovation
With every new release, Fedora is often leading the charge to implement new free software technologies. In fact, Fedora’s primary sponsor Red Hat is responsible for some of the greatest desktop enhancements ever, including AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GLX), D-Bus, DeviceKit, HAL, NetworkManager, Ogg Theora, and PolicyKit. Even the Wayland display server (which Ubuntu has announced they are moving to) was started by Kristian Høgsberg when he was working for Red Hat (he’s now at Intel).

Not to mention that out of all the vendors, Red Hat contributes the most to the Linux kernel and to X.Org. Red Hat is also the biggest contributor to GNOME (including GNOME Shell) and they also provides infrastructure, hosting and bandwidth for the project.

Kudos.

Upstream
Fedora works as closely to upstream as possible. They don’t go off on their own tangent with disregard for upstream projects. If they want to have something changed, they work with upstream to create fixes and introduce new features.

Take the Chromium web browser for example. It’s not included in Fedora for several reasons, but Fedora people are working with Google to fix these issues, so that it can be included nicely. By doing this, other distros will benefit!

Having said that, there are Chromuim builds available too. Just add the repository and away you go!

Security
I used to wonder at the usefulness of SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). Afterall, this is Linux right? It’s secure enough.

That might be true, but SELinux is still extremely useful (and even Debian is now implementing SELinux).

SELinux works by protecting your system, even if there is an exploit available in an application which gives users root access. Take Apache for example. In a non-SELinux enabled system, if a user gains root through an exploit in Apache they will have full access to your machine. Not so with SELinux. Even if someone gains root access, there are rules around what Apache can and can’t do. For example, these might be restricting it to only read the directory which holds websites. Your system is compromised, but the damage is limited.

SELinux is not just useful for servers. It’s also valuable to your desktop system, especially if you use Adobe’s proprietary flash player (which is known to have lots of security holes). When Fedora first implemented SELinux, there were lots of issues because it would block the system from doing what was considered normal tasks. These growing pains are now over, and SELinux rarely gets in the way. Even if it does, the graphical tool which pops up will tell you how to change that particular behaviour (if you really want to).

Of course, at the end of the day you can still turn SELinux off (or just to warning mode). Kororaa leaves it enabled, as it’s a great way to add extra security to your system, especially as a major part of our lives are now lived on the Internet.

Tools
Fedora comes with lots of handy graphical tools to help you manage your system, including

  • firewall
  • language settings
  • network shares
  • services
  • users
  • web server

And many more..

Reliability
In the last few years I’ve been solely using Fedora and I have been super impressed with its reliability. Things just work, as you would expect them to. No weirdness. Even though Fedora provides major updates to many packages, it’s still more reliable than other popular distributions I’ve used. Perhaps this is due to sticking close to upstream.

Summary
Fedora is truly a great, free operating system. Its core principles are ones that I fully support, but which I recognise might restrict or turn off some users. This is why I chose to re-launch Kororaa as I have, so that users don’t give up on Fedora (and Linux) before they have a chance to love it. I see great potential in Fedora, and great benefit to those who are using it.

Thanks to their wonderful build tools like livecd-creator, I am able to build a powerful operating system that includes all those tweaks and extras that users want.

Now, why not give Kororaa a shot? 🙂