New Fedora 7 features First Open Source Appliance Development Stack Builder

Red Hat, Inc’s sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration ‘The Fedora Project’ has released Fedora 7, the new version of its distribution. Fedora Project’s main aim is to offer the best next-gen open source technologies and the latest version includes a new build capacity that allows for the creation of custom distributions. Fedora 7 now offers a completely open source build process that to a great extent simplifies the creation of appliances that can be targeted to satisfy individual needs.

Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat said, “Fedora 7 development has focused on improving the manner in which all Fedora releases will be made.” Spevack continued, “Beyond the usual set of upstream changes and improvements, our latest release is by far the most exciting and flexible to date. With our new open source build process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly powerful.”

Fedora 7 gives the first appliance development platform that is 100 percent open source with a totally the free distribution build toolchain. Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and the distributions are built with an external, open source compose tool that enables access by the full Fedora community.

With Fedora 7, the community is given an advanced role that induces better openness and collaboration. Thanks to its flexible, public build environment, Fedora 7 users can get the ability to customize like never before. With these abilities, blended with live CD, DVD and USB technology, the possibilities for appliance creation are endless. Once it is customized, Fedora can be loaded onto several forms of bootable media, enabling users to run their operating system without a hard disk installation.

Apart from Xen, Fedora 7 features Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Qemu virtualization technologies. All implementations can be managed using the Fedora graphical virtualization manager.

Furthermore, the Fedora 7 release also marks a noteworthy achievement in Fedora’s emergence as a leading community-driven project. Previously, the packages in Fedora Core were maintained only by Red Hat employees, while the packages in Fedora Extras were taken care of by community members. Fedora 7 does away with this distinction; the new single Fedora repository is accessible to Red Hat employees and community members alike, giving the community more influence over Fedora than ever before.

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