Korora 18's "Flo" offers a friendlier Fedora 18

Korora's GNOME desktop

The Korora Project is a Linux distribution which hails from Australia and has been offering a friendly Linux since 2005, when it was based on Gentoo. In 2010, it switched over to Fedora and became a remix – now the developers have released Korora 18, "Flo" based on Fedora 18. Actually, the developers just renamed the beta release as final as they found no major issues during the beta period. Korora 18 comes in two flavours with a GNOME and KDE desktop.

Each has the Adobe Flash plugin, experimental support for the Valve Steam client, VLC as the default media client, and Firefox as the default browser with Adblock Plus and other plugins enabled by default. Installing other software is made easier as the third party repositories for Chrome, RPMFusion, VirtualBox are already configured.

Setting up a video card with a proprietary driver is also simplified as the Jockey device manager is configured to handle ATI and NVIDIA drivers. On the GNOME variant, Empathy, Gwibber and OpenShot handle the instant messaging, microblogging and video editing duties – Kopete, Choqok and Kdenlive take those roles on in the KDE variant.

Other notable elements in the Korora mix are utilities like unburden-home-dir, which relocates caches to RAMFS, and undistract-me, which pops up a notifier when a command has completed in the terminal. There is also experimental Cinnamon desktop support in the GNOME version and SELinux is shipped enabled.

The GNOME and KDE versions of Korora 18 are available to download as ISO images for 32- or 64-bit systems. The images range from 1.7GB in size for the 32-bit GNOME version to 2.3GB for the 64-bit KDE version.

(djwm)