Fedora 12 GNU/Linux - Unite

Fedora is the community-based distribution that replaced the old official Red Hat CD sets. New software gets tried out here before finding its way into Red Hat Enterprise editions, making Fedora the cutting edge of the Red Hat world.

Fedora 12, or 'Unite', is the very latest in the Fedora series. It is a community-based release and features thousands of software packages. See the Tour .

• Fedora 12 DVD
• Fedora 12 Live CD GNOME
• Fedora 12 Live CD KDE
• Fedora 12 Source DVD

As with Fedora 10 and 11, Red Hat have followed Ubuntu in releasing different flavours of Fedora. There are:

• Full DVD's, equivalent to previous releases, giving a choice of Desktop, Workstation and Server installs.
• Live single CD images, which are bootable and can be installed to your hard drive. They are available with either GNOME or KDE desktops.
• A source DVD, with all the source packages.

We don't know if Red Hat consulted our retired PM, but they've called these different flavours 'spins'.

Which Option do I Need ?

Are you confused when you come to choose between the i386 and x86_64 options for these CDs and DVDs? This may help:

• The i386 option is suitable for all relatively modern Intel and AMD 32 bit processors (Intel Pentium, Celeron, Core Solo, Duo, etc; AMD Geode (GX,LX,NX), Duron, Athlon (K6/K7), Sempron without AMD64 support, etc). Also it will run happily on Intel and AMD 64 bit processors, but not achieve their full potential.
• The x86_64 option is suitable only for 64 bit processors (AMD Athlon 64, Turion 64, Opteron, Sempron with AMD64 support, etc; Intel processors with EM64T support: Core 2, Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, Xeon, some versions of Pentium 4 and Celeron D, etc). The x86_64 option will allow the full performance and memory addressing capabilities of these powerful processors to be realised. However, not all software has been ported to the 64 bit platform.
• The i386 32 bit option will run on most AMD and Intel processors, including 64 bit versions.
• The x86_64 64 bit version will run on AMD64 and Intel EM64T processors only. If you need their full performance, choose this option for 64 bit processors but be aware that some (non-Fedora) software you may wish to use (eg browser plugins) may not have been ported to the 64-bit platform.
• If you don't need the full 64 bit performance (most of us don't), the i386 option is the most useful currently.