With all of the noise surrounding Ubuntu, it’s nice to see that Fedora has not been forgotten about. It’s a solid distro, even with its “issues’.

I like playing with the newest software games, toys, and applications. At the same time, I have work to do, and I need a solid, stable platform that I don’t have to babysit. As a full-time blogger and part-time Web programmer, I need a wide variety of tools at my disposal, and I frequently need the latest versions of available software. Balancing stability against the bleeding edge is a difficult trick, and that’s why Fedora Core 5 is my desktop OS.

The Fedora Core 5 installation is just about the simplest installation available. It’s been further simplified from previous versions of Fedora Core in the area of package selection. You simply choose which tasks you need to perform, such as Office/Productivity, Software Development, and Web Server. You can further customize the packages to be installed if you like, and even the custom package selection is easier to use. Once installed, you can use the new Pirut graphical tool to manage your packages, or yum from the command line.

Fedora Core 5 includes drivers for virtually any piece of hardware you can think of, including the new bcm43xx driver for the Broadcom Wi-Fi card built in to my new laptop, so I’m now using FC5 on both my desktop and laptop. It does have some problems with my Adaptec FireWire PCI card; it doesn’t always recognize when I have unplugged my iPod (and yes, I ejected it) so it won’t always recognize the iPod when I plug it back in.

In addition to the wide variety of software included with Fedora Core 5, you can install additional repositories, such as RPMforge (formerly dag/dries), livna, and FreshRPMs, which among other things provide software that Fedora Core cannot ship with the OS for legal reasons, such as video drivers for ATI and Nvidia cards, Acrobat Reader, and Macromedia Flash Player…. Source: NewsForge

Tags: toys, applications, fedora core, software games