The Fedora Project is a open source extension of Red Hat Linux, the first distribution of Linux to be developed and marketed by a software vendor. Red Hat built its collection of packages around the freely available, open source Linux kernel and sold it as a commercial product. It simultaneously made the distribution available for free via downloads from its web site and a multitude of mirrors.

In 2003, Red Hat announced that it would cease development of Red Hat Linux with Red Hat Linux 9 and future commercial versions of Red Hat products would be available by subscription only under its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line. At the same time, Red Hat announced that it would be merging its open source development with the Fedora Linux project, an open source effort to provide extra packages to the Red Hat Linux distributions.

The resulting collaboration is an open source community effort guided by Red Hat with the goal of creating an operating system distribution completely from open source software. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux guarantees stability and new versions are only released at roughly 18 month intervals, new Fedora releases are generated 2-3 times per year and older versions become unsupported. Therefore, Fedora is affectionately referred to as bleeding edge software. Red Hat has since announced that Fedora will serve as the experimental proving ground for future developments of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Initially two trees of packages were developed for Fedora users. Fedora Core was the base collection of packages released on the ISOs of a given distribution. These packages made up the core of the distribution as determined by a specific set of criteria set by the community. Other packages built as add-ons to Fedora Core, were referred to as Fedora Extras and are maintained in separate repositories with their own stable, testing and development versions. In 2007, with the release of Fedora 7, these two package trees were merged into one and given the name Fedora.

There are other collections of packages, maintained by groups outside the Fedora Project, that also hold software that can be installed on your Fedora system. One such repository, developed by the RPMForge group is commonly referred to as the Dag Wieers repository.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux group is providing a mirror of all these packages that is updated each morning after midnight CDT.

The collections in the Fedora, Fedora Core and Fedora Extras repositories contain ISOs and RPMs that have been organized by version number. ISOs are usually used to install the base distribution. The RPMs are then used to install individual packages or provide updates to your system after it has been built. Your initial installation of Fedora Core will probably be done via a set of ISOs you will download from a mirror such as this and burn onto a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. Before burning these ISOs, you should verify their integrity by checking their md5sums (or sha1sums). against those found on the mirror from which they were obtained.

All Fedora RPMs are signed with Fedora GPG public keys specific to each repository. To use the keys, you will need to download them and import them into your key ring. For Fedora prior to version 7, the keys for both Fedora Core and Fedora Extras can be found in the os directory of your particular architecture under the core tree. All the keys are installed in the following way

where <GPG-KEY> should be replaced with the file name containing the appropriate key. The most likely method you will use to install Fedora Core on your system will be by means of a set of CDROM discs or a DVD onto which you have burned the Fedora Core ISOs. Instructions on how to prepare your system for installation and which discs you will need can be found at the Fedora how to download page. For bandwidth reasons, rather than using the locations they suggest, the ISOs themselves and the md5sums (sha1sums) should be retrieved from this mirror at the followings places

test (Fedora 9)	i386	x86_64	ppc
Fedora 8	i386	x86_64	ppc
Fedora 7	i386	x86_64	ppc
Fedora Core 6 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64	ppc
FC5 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64	ppc
FC4 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64	ppc
FC3 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64
FC2 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64
FC1 (no longer supported)	i386	x86_64

After installing the system, you should update the packages. OK. So you have a Fedora (or Fedora Core) system installed on your hardware. You should regularly update the system to apply critical security patches and bug fixes to provide you with a reliable and stable environment. You may also wish to install packages from other repositories such as the RPMForge or Fedora Extras. How you should go about applying updates and how to install extra packages depends on what you currently have installed on your system.

All stable releases of Fedora have stable updates stored in the updates tree. The updates themselves are continually being modified and these packages are collected in the testing tree under the updates tree. On the other hand, if you are using the latest version of Fedora, the test version, updates for that are found under the development tree.

The last stable release of Fedora Core (Fedora Core 6) has stable updates stored in the core/updates tree. Until support for this version is dropped, the updates themselves will continually be modified and these packages are collected in the testing tree under the core/updates tree.

The Fedora Extras packages are subject to the same requirements as those that are included in Fedora Core. The packages are collected under a tree similar to that used by Fedora Core, by version and architecture.

Test versions for Fedora Extras packages for Fedora Core6 are stored under a debug tree for your particular architecture.

You could do-it-yourself, applying updates and installing packages by hand using RPMs. You'd quickly find that many packages have dependencies on other packages and you'd have to hunt those down and install them as well. Or, you could use a package management tool to handle these dependencies for you.

The Fedora Core and Extras repositories on this mirror have been layed out as a yum repository system. This allows an easy and integrated way for you to update your systems using the yum tools. yum handles dependencies for you, installing other packages required by the package you wish to install.

It is assumed that you have experience with yum. If not, the link in the previous paragraph is a good place to start and you may also wish to consult the Fedora yum documentation. Here we provide you with the information on what you need to include in your configuration files to use this mirror server.

yum retrieves all of the information it needs to install an RPM from the RPM headers themselves. Configuring yum to find an RPM repository is a simple matter of informing yum of the location of a server (or a mirror list of servers) that has a copy of the RPM (and its dependencies) and which protocol to use to download the packages. Fedora automatically configures your system to use yum with several repository mirrors when you install the system. If you wish to manually configure the system to use this mirror or any another repository and/or you wish to configure an older system to use Fedora Extras, you should add a file for the repository to the directory /etc/yum.repos.d on your local system.

For Fedora, your repo file should look like

For Fedora Core, it will include something similar to the following:

Note that we have several entries disabled. You should do the same for version branches you are not using in order to prevent yourself from shooting yourself in the foot. They are included should you decide to test packages in the development tree. You should also disable the preconfigured repositories by setting

enable=0

in their respective repo files.

Consult the yum.conf man page if you wish to delve deeper into the details of these settings.

You may also simply download the RPMs via http or ftp. and install them yourself using rpm. There is more information available about the Fedora Core Project and Fedora Extras at the web site
 
http://fedoraproject.org/
 
You are especially encouraged to consult the Fedora Installation Guide and subscribe to any of the mailing lists to receive announcements about updates as they are made available.

You may also contact the people who maintain this mirror.