Fedora is an RPM-based, general purpose Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

One of Fedora's main objectives is to not only contain free and open source software, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Also, developers in Fedora prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora – this ensures that updates are available to all Linux distributions.

History of Fedora OS

The Fedora Project was created in late 2003, when Red Hat Linux was discontinued. Red Hat Enterprise Linux would continue to be Red Hat's only officially supported Linux distribution, while Fedora was to be a community project and distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux branches its releases from versions of Fedora.

The name of Fedora derives from Fedora Linux, a volunteer project that provided extra software for the Red Hat Linux distribution, and from the characteristic fedora used in Red Hat "Shadowman" logo. Fedora Linux was eventually absorbed into the Fedora Project. Fedora is a trademark of Red Hat. Although this has previously been disputed by the creators of the Fedora repository management software, the issue has now been resolved.

Software repositories

Before Fedora 7, there were two main repositories – Core and Extras. Fedora Core contained all the base packages that were required by the operating system, as well as other packages that were distributed along with the installation CD/DVDs. Fedora Extras, the secondary repository that was included from Fedora Core 3, was community-maintained and not distributed along with the installation CD/DVDs. Since Fedora 7, the Core and Extras repositories have been merged, hence the distribution's dropping the Core from its name.

Also prior to Fedora 7 being released, there was a third repository called Fedora Legacy. This repository was community-maintained and was mainly concerned with extending the life cycle of older Fedora Core distributions and selected Red Hat Linux releases that were no longer officially maintained. Fedora Legacy was shut down in December 2006.