When Red Hat inc. turned its general-purpose Linux distribution from a retail product to the community-supported Fedora project, the company set out to define the project by the aggressiveness of its development course.
It’s no surprise, then, that Fedora Core 2 will be among the first Linux distributions built around the new 2.6 kernel. (Red Hat’s more staid Enterprise Linux product isn’t set to adopt the new kernel until the distribution’s Version 4 release this fall.) eWEEK Labs tested Fedora Core 2 Test 1 on a few different systems, and we were generally impressed with the smoothness and stability of the release.
We also found that Fedora’s implementation of the KDE Project’s KDE 3.2 and the GNOME Project’s GNOME 2.5.3 desktop environments were much improved compared with the versions of those interfaces that shipped with Fedora Core 1.
The other major new system slated for inclusion in Fedora Core 2 Test 1, released last month, is SELinux, a security architecture developed by the U.S. National Security Agency that enables administrators to set finer-grained access control policies for users than are otherwise possible in Linux.