Selected article

Fedora (pronounced /fəˈdɔərə/) is an RPM-based, general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux distributions.

Fedora has a comparatively short life cycle: version X is maintained until one month after version X+2 is released. With 6 months between releases, the maintenance period is about 13 months for each version.

Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel, says he uses Fedora because it had fairly good support for PowerPC when he used that processor architecture. He became accustomed to the operating system and continues to use it.

According to Distrowatch, Fedora is the second most popular Linux-based operating system as of mid 2009, behind Ubuntu.

Selected biography

Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959 in England) is an Australian software engineer, best known as one of the lead developers of the Linux kernel. He currently maintains a patchset known as the mm tree, which contains not yet sufficiently tested patches that might later be accepted into the official Linux tree maintained by Linus Torvalds.

Since August 2006, Morton has been employed by Google but will continue his current work in maintaining the kernel. ^{[1] [2]}

Andrew Morton delivered the keynote speech at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium. He is also a featured speaker at MontaVista Software's Vision 2007 Conference. ^[3]

Selected quote

In the news

• 2009-12-03 Linux kernel 2.6.32 released.
• 2009-11-28 Linux Mint 8 "Helena" released.
• 2009-11-17 Fedora 12 "Constantine" released.
• 2009-11-11 OpenSUSE 11.2 released.
• 2009-10-29 Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" released.
• 2009-09-09 Linux kernel 2.6.31 released.
• 2009-06-10 Linux kernel 2.6.30 released.
• 2009-05-26 Linux Mint 7 "Gloria" released.
• 2009-04-23 Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" released.
• 2009-03-23 Linux kernel 2.6.29 released.
• 2008-12-25 Linux kernel 2.6.28 released.
• 2008-11-25 Fedora 10 "Cambridge" released.

Selected picture

The KDE 4 desktop environment.

Did you know?

• ... that Linux was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds?
• ... that there are hundreds of Linux distributions?
• ... that the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel?
• ... that Linux was inspired by MINIX?
• ... that Linux supports over 15 hardware architectures?
• ... that the Linux kernel is coded in C?
• ... that the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL?
• ... that the Linux kernel uses an 1:1 thread model?

Categories

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Linux gaming - Linux kernel - Linux kernel portability and supported architectures - Desktop Linux - History of Linux - Linux adoption - Tux -- Linux distribution - Embedded Linux - Linux devices - Linux Foundation - Linux User Group

Technology: ext3 • ext4 • Netfilter • Kernel-based Virtual Machine • Filesystem in Userspace • Netlink • CFQ • Completely Fair Scheduler • dm-crypt

People: Linus Torvalds • Andrew Morton • Greg Kroah-Hartman • Rusty Russell • Alan Cox • Jens Axboe • H. Peter Anvin • Theodore Ts'o • Harald Welte

Companies: Canonical Ltd. • Red Hat • Novell • Mandriva

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