eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Fedora 7

Fedora 7s Anaconda installer comes along with a new map magnification widget for selecting your time zone.

Fedoras package selection interface shows up all over the distribution–here in the installer, in Fedoras kickstart unattended install script application, and in Fedoras new custom distro builder, Revisor.

As in previous releases, Fedora 7s firstboot utility greets you upon–you guessed it–your first boot.

Fedora 7s firewall and SElinux configuration settings are now split into separate configuration interfaces.

We always start our Fedora instances off with SElinux set to Permissive mode, in which the tool flags permissions conflicts, but does not block the flagged operations.

Fedora 7 ships with the option of sending hardware information to the Fedora team to aid in their development efforts.

Fedora 7 includes the same authentication options that the system offered in previous releases. Were still waiting patiently to see the Fedora Directory Server become well-integrated into Fedora. Maybe in Fedora 8?

The version of Fedora 7s YUM software management tool (shown here in a screen from the final Fedora 7 test release) is noticably faster than the YUM releases that accompanied previous Fedora builds.

If youre going to run Fedora 7 with SElinux enabled, youll be getting to know the systems SElinux Troubleshooter, which now comes enabled by default. We found that by enabling NTP time synchronization using firstboot we ran afoul of SElin

Fedora 7s Revisor bundles together a vast cast of distro-building tools under a common interface.

Revisor will build custom Fedora spins in a handful of flavors–were looking forward to seeing the Fedora team add virtual machine formats to the mix.

Revisor ships with configuration files for building custom Fedora 6 and 7 spins, as well as spins based on Red Hats rawhide development branch. Were looking forward to seeing CentOS or RHEL-based spins as well.

If you have kickstart unattended install scripts hanging around, Revisor will readily build Fedora spins based on them.

Xen network configuration is a somewhat confusing affair–Fedora 7s updated graphical interface for VM building has matured to make the process easier.

The first versions of Fedoras virtual machine manager we tested did a very poor job of providing useful error feedback. The version that ships with Fedora 7 has grown more helpful.

Again, Fedoras virtualization tools have grown to do a better job keeping users apprised of whats going on.

Our path to installing RHEL 5 atop Fedora 7 ran with pleasant smoothness.

Puzzlingly, the virtualization manager that shipped with RHEL 5 would only list running VMs–this latest version also list stopped VMs, which we could then start up.

Fedora 7 sports a bit of menu reorganization– the personal preferences section, which had grown too large to fit on a single screen, is now broken up a bit.