Community welcomes Fedora 8 with strong download numbers

RALEIGH, USA: The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announced that installations of the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 8, have reached beyond 54,000 since its availability on Nov. 8, 2007. Fedora 8 enhancements include the expanded ability for users to create custom spins or appliances, increased security features, a new look and feel and numerous technical advances.

First established in Fedora 7, the ability to create custom spins or appliances that allow users to create a combination of specific software to meet individual requirements has been expanded in Fedora 8. Fedora 8 marks the debut of three new spins: Games, Developer and Electronic Lab spins that offer prepared customization for users with a specific interest in gaming, development and electronics applications respectively. The new Fedora spins exemplify the easy customization of the Fedora Project's newest distribution and demonstrate the freedom, ability and desire of the community of developers to remix Fedora in the ways that are most useful to them.

"After these tools were introduced with Fedora 7, they were championed by the community, effectively making freedom a feature of the distribution," said Jack Aboutboul, community engineer for Fedora at Red Hat. "The customization allows for massive time savings that allows engineers and community contributors to focus less on how to build the distribution and more on driving innovation."

Fedora 8 offers both GNOME and KDE-based Live CDs and a general-purpose installable DVD for workstations and servers. It also includes improved Live USB support, making it possible to install, boot and run the entire distribution off of a USB key without touching the computer's hard disk at all. This enhancement makes Fedora attractive to those who wish to experiment with Linux without risking their data.

In addition, Fedora 8 incorporates a wide array of technical advances. This distribution becomes the first to enable PulseAudio, a sound server that acts as a proxy between all of a user's sound applications, by default. With PulseAudio, users can enjoy features such as different volumes for different applications, hot-plugging support for USB sound devices and support for audio over the network. Fedora 8 additionally includes improved graphical tools for firewall configuration, enhanced printer management and an update for Bluetooth integration. Network Manager, the easy-to-use wireless configuration tool written by Red Hat and adopted by many prominent Linux distributions, has also been updated.

As is customary with recent releases, Fedora 8 boasts an entirely new default look and feel on the desktop, all based on community artwork. The Fedora 8 theme of "infinity" includes a default background that changes shades, growing brighter or darker in accordance with the time of day.