Fedora Linux Distribution Reference

Fedora Core is Red Hat's free hobbyist version of Linux, designed to mature technologies quickly for use in the premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux product and to sate developers' appetite for new features. The Fedora foundation was announced by Redhat in in June of 2005.

In April of 2006 Redhat announced cancellation of the Fedora Foundation. This doesn't mean the distribution has been cancelled, but rather the body that maintains it will change. They moved the governing of Fedora Core from the foundation to the Fedora Project Board. The board includes five Red Hat employees and four outsiders. This move was a means for Redhat to keep the Fedora developers focused on initiatives more in line with Redhat's overall agenda.

The Fedora distribution lives on. Fedora 9 will be (or has been depending on when you are reading this) released by the Fedora Project in May, 2008. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join.

 

Administrative Tasks

Note: the System menu is not in the traditional place, it is a seperate menu, from the left the 4th over on the task bar.

Screensaver and Screensaver Password

Change your screen saver by going to System, Preferences, Look and Feel, Screensaver.

Changing the display resolution and color depth

From the System menu choose System, Administration, Display. On the resulting Screen Resolution Preferences window, use the Resolution drop-down box to choose the resolution that you desire.

If you can't see all of the resolutions supported by your monitor it is probably due to an install time issue. You can change this configuration by going to System, Administration, Display to change the system system-wide display settings. When you open up certain applets from the System menu, Fedora prompts you for the root password, since these tools require administrative access to the machine. Once you provide the root password, the "Display settings" dialog window opens. From this menu, select the resolution that you would like to use.

 

3rd Party Software

TightVNC

An easy way to remotely run the xwindows desktop from a ms-windows system. Download and install the package:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vnc-tight/tightvnc-server-1.3.9-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ih tightvnc-server-1.3.9-1.i386.rpm

The only documentation included with the RPM worth reading is at:

/usr/share/doc/tightvnc-server-1.3.9/README

The binary executables:

/usr/bin/vncviewer
/usr/bin/vncserver
/usr/bin/vncpasswd
/usr/bin/vncconnect
/usr/bin/Xvnc

To configure the package as a service: The RPM places the InitV startup scripts in the correct Redhat places.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc2.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc4.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K35vncserver
/etc/rc.d/rc6.d/K35vncserver

To EDIT the TightVNC configuration file:

vi /etc/sysconfig/vncservers