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Appendix

Additional information on Laughlin and Fedora in general:

Sources of further information

The desktop version of Fedora 14 is available for downloading as a LiveCD or install DVD image from either the main download page (x86-32) or from the alternate mirrors page (x86-32 and x86-36 versions) of the Fedora Project web site. The mirrors page may be the better choice as the local mirrors should provide a more reliable and speedy download, alternatively BitTorrent can be used. Spins are available from another site which also has background information describing the intended hardware platform and application for each of the spins.

There is a mass of information on Fedora 14 available from the Fedora web site, via the home page or from the documentation page. The release notes give an overview of the important new features and in some cases describe them in some detail. The Fedora developers maintain a list of frequently encountered problems with Fedora 14th on the project wiki pages.

In the accompanying text of this feature there are many links to further information on the improvements in Fedora 14. The Fedora release notes page gives a good short overview of the innovations in the new release while the Fedora 14 Talking Points amd the release announcement provide this information in more detail. Although the page is only place holdered at the moment interviews with developers, providing background information on some of the new features are planned for the project wiki.


Often unavoidable extensions

Like its predecessors, Fedora 14 – apart from a few firmware files – only contains software released under one of the open source licences approved by the Fedora project; Licences which, for instance, don't permit the commercial use or the sharing of software are not included on Fedora's list. The Fedora project also disregards software which is known to use patented technologies.

All of this is designed to protect Fedora users and third parties, who want to distribute a modified or unmodified version of the Linux distribution together with their hardware, from potential claims by copyright and patent holders. However, it also means that Fedora 14 lacks various features many users require in everyday use. This includes Adobe's Flash player and the proprietary graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics chips as well as the software for rendering many popular audio and video formats – the latter includes MP3 playback, because patent troll Sisvel has been known to assert ownership rights to MP3.

On notebooks and desktops, a Fedora 14 installation therefore only becomes truly operational once package repositories have been activated which allow various programs excluded by the Fedora project to be added to the installation. The most well-known and popular repositories for Fedora are probably the free and non-free RPM Fusion repositories. They can be enabled during the installation of the distribution or activated once Fedora has been installed. Configuring RPM Fusion allows PackageKit to install plug-ins that are not included in Fedora but available on RPM Fusion when they are requested by GStreamer-based applications such as Totem. The project explains how to install NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver in a howto.

RPM Fusion contains many, but by no means all, popular applications and drivers ignored by Fedora. Adobe Reader and the Adobe Flash plug-in, for instance, can't be included because the respective program licences prohibit it; these components are best obtained directly from the package repository maintained by Adobe. Google also maintain their own package repository offering Picasa (x86-32 only), Chrome and the Google desktop. Various other programs not included in Fedora or RPM Fusion can be found in other third party repositories for Fedora.


Spins, remixes, etc.

The package repositories of Fedora 14 contain more than ten thousand packages which the Fedora project combines to create different variants of the distribution.

The largest variety of software and the greatest number of installation options can be found on the "traditional" installation media the project offers to download as CD or DVD ISOs for x86-32 and x86-64 systems. There is also a lean variant which, similar to the boot images at boot.fedoraproject.org, enables users to install via the network. In all these variants users have control over the selection of packages to be installed and can, for instance, choose between GNOME and KDE. While less mainstream applications and desktop environments such as LXDE or Xfce are not included on the CDs and DVDs, they can be selected directly during installation if the online repositories are enabled as an installation source.

In addition, the project offers "Spins" – various live media that contain software collections customised for different groups of users. Like the main installation CD of Ubuntu, the spins are not only suitable for testing Fedora without risk, but also for installing the distribution on a hard disk. However, unlike the traditional installer or the Ubuntu installation CD, this option doesn't allow users to select a file system for the root partition and installs Ext4 by default – on the other hand, this installation method is really fast.

The Spin regarded as most important by the project is the desktop Spin, which includes GNOME and has been given a prominent place on Fedora's main download page; the KDE Spin can also be found there. Like the package repositories and the ISO images of the traditional installation media, both Spins are available on hundreds of mirror servers located all over the world. A dedicated web page offers further Spins – including several with desktop environments such as LXDE or Xfce, one which offers the Moblin interface, a security Spin, a Sugar on a Stick Spin, and a gaming-oriented games Spin. The latter fills up a DVD, but most of the other Spins fit on a CD.

Since Fedora 12, users have been able to transfer the ISO files of Spins and the netbook image to a USB flash drive via such programs as "dd". Those who intend to permanently run a Fedora Spin from a USB flash drive should transfer the files to USB using liveusb-creator, which is available for Linux and Windows and was already used for previous versions of Fedora. When starting the Spin, this program can automatically create a memory area for storing the data written during operation – such as documents or manually installed or updated software.

The programs on the livecd-tools combined with the appropriate Kickstart files provide users with a relatively easy way to create a custom distribution from the packages in the Fedora repositories. If you want to share your remix you're not allowed to use the Fedora trademark; this can easily be achieved by replacing three packages. The project's naming regulations also prohibit that such custom distributions be called Spins when they are shared. Instead, the project recommends the term "Fedora remix" to denominate the distribution's origin, but avoid any confusion between custom installations and Fedora's own distribution variants.

Only the traditional installation media allow fully or partially automated installations via kickstart, network installations and the updating of previous Fedora installations. Updating via PreUpgrade is probably the best solution for most users, because this is more convenient and faster, and it also updates packages that are not included on the media.

All variants of Fedora 14, and generally also the remixes, use the same package repositories for manual software installation. It is, therefore, possible to install the packages of the KDE Spin in the GNOME Spin and vice versa. These repositories also allow users to manually install software such as OpenOffice, which is excluded from many Spins due to space limitations – for example by executing the following command line instruction as root:

yum install \
openoffice.org-{calc,draw,graphicfilter,impress,writer,xsltfilter}

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