First Open Source Appliance Development Stack Builder Now Available in Fedora 7

May 31, 2007; 05:14 AM
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 7, is now available. The Fedora Project provides the best of next-generation open source technologies and, in its latest version, features a new build capacity that allows for the creation of custom distributions. Fedora 7 now offers a completely open source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances that can be targeted to meet individual needs.

“Fedora 7 development has focused on improving the manner in which all Fedora releases will be made,” said Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. “Beyond the usual set of upstream changes and improvements, our latest release is by far the most exciting and flexible to date. With our new open source build process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly powerful.”

Fedora 7 provides the first appliance development platform that is 100 percent open source with an entirely free distribution build toolchain. The Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and the distributions are built with an external, open source compose tool that allows access by the entire Fedora community.

Through Fedora 7, the community is given an enhanced role that encourages greater openness and collaboration. As a result of its flexible, public build environment, Fedora 7 provides users with the ability to customize like never before. With these capabilities, combined with live CD, DVD and USB technology, the possibilities for appliance creation are endless. After customization, Fedora can be loaded onto various forms of bootable media, allowing users to run their operating system without a hard disk installation.

Fedora 7 features Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Qemu virtualization technologies in addition to Xen. All implementations can be managed using the Fedora graphical virtualization manager.

The Fedora 7 release also marks a significant milestone in Fedora's emergence as a leading community-driven project. Formerly, the packages in Fedora Core were maintained only by Red Hat employees, while the packages in Fedora Extras were maintained by community members. Fedora 7 does away with this distinction; the new single Fedora repository is accessible to Red Hat employees and community members alike, giving the community more influence over Fedora than ever before.

For more information on Fedora, to download or to join this community effort, please visit: http://fedoraproject.org.

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