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It took just three days before 54,000 copies of Fedora 8, the Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported Linux distribution, were up and running.
Fedora 8 was released on Nov. 8. Fedora 8 enhancements include the expanded ability for users to create custom spins or appliances, increased security features, a new look and feel, and numerous technical advances.
If you dont like how Fedora 8 looks, works, or whats inside it, you can always create your own custom “spin” of Fedora. A spin is a combination of specific software to meet an individual users requirements. This feature was first introduced in Fedora 7. In Fedora 8, the default system comes with four new spins: Games, Developer, Electronic Lab and KDE, which uses the popular desktop in place of Fedoras default GNOME desktop interface.
Users can also create their own Fedora spins. So, for example, if you wanted a small office standard desktop distribution, you could easily build one with OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird for your essential office jobs, while leaving out everything else.
After the spin tools were introduced with Fedora 7, “they were championed by the community, effectively making freedom a feature of the distribution,” said Jack Aboutboul, a community engineer for Fedora at Red Hat, in a statement. “The customization allows for massive time savings that allows engineers and community contributors to focus less on how to build the distribution and more on driving innovation.”