Welcome to a brand new Operating System that shines above all of the other Operating Systems available to choose from! Thank you for choosing Fedora Core 6 to be your Operating System! What is an Operating System, you ask? Well, it is an interface for a collection of software all working together to bring you the information you need to run tasks. Once you get past the Installation process, the GNOME desktop opens with a screen consisting of a menu bar on the top, empty space in the middle that can be used to display icons or graphics, and a task bar that shows which “window” is open. With the KDE desktop, there is one “windows”-like menu-bar on the bottom. Finally, with the Xfce desktop, it is arranged in a different manner than GNOME or KDE. This sounds complicated but all they describe is the screen you see every time Fedora Core runs.

Here is a brief history of how it was developed. Fedora Core began life as Red Hat Linux. It was one of the "middle-aged" Linux distributions; 1.0 was released in November 3, 1994. It is not as old as Slackware, but certainly older than many other distributions. It was the first Linux distribution to use RPM as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as the desktop-oriented Mandriva Linux (originally Red Hat Linux with KDE), Yellow Dog Linux (which started from Red Hat Linux with PowerPC support), and ASPLinux (Red Hat Linux with better non-Latin character support). Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux for enterprise environments and Fedora Core for the free version. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although the Fedora Legacy project continues to publish updates.

Fedora Core is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. The name derives from Red Hat's characteristic fedora used in its "Shadowman" logo. However, the Fedora community project had existed as a volunteer group providing extra software for the Red Hat Linux distribution before Red Hat got involved as a direct sponsor. Fedora aims to be a complete, general-purpose operating system containing only free and open source software. Fedora is designed to be easily installed and configured with a simple graphical installer and the 'system-config' suite of configuration tools. The installation system includes an option to use GNU GRUB, a boot loader, facilitating the use of Fedora in conjunction with another operating system. Packages and their dependencies can be easily downloaded and installed with the yum utility. New releases of Fedora come out every six to eight months. Fedora ships with GNOME and KDE, and spans 5 CDs or a single DVD. Network installations are available from a single small 6 MB boot.iso image. The installer supports installation via HTTP, FTP, and NFS, and remote installation progress can be monitored via VNC.

The name Fedora Core distinguishes the main Fedora packages from those of the Fedora Extras project, which provides add-ons to Fedora Core. Fedora was derived from the original Red Hat Linux distribution. The project envisages that conventional Linux home users will use Fedora Core, and intends that it replace the consumer distributions of Red Hat Linux. Support for Fedora comes from the greater community (although Red Hat staff work on it, Red Hat does not provide official support for Fedora). Fedora came about as a result of a new business strategy which Red Hat implemented late in 2003 - Red Hat now positions Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a business-oriented Linux distribution, and all official support is for that distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases are branched off Fedora Core, which has led some critics to observe that Fedora Core users are in effect beta testers for RHEL.

In some ways, it is true that Fedora Core is a testbed for RHEL but it is a very good consumer Operating System in its own right. The community develops and supports 90 percent of Fedora Core. It is good to have a major sponsor such as Red Hat so Fedora will be around for a long long time. You can trust Fedora to be YOUR Operating System!