Fedora 11 "Leonidas" Review (Page 3 of 4)

For dial-up users or users who incur bandwidth usage charges Fedora 11 brings you Presto support. Presto is now found in the Fedora 11 repositories and can be installed from the command line using yum install yum-presto. There's that nasty command line we were trying to avoid! Presto allows you to download delta RPMs instead of the full RPM package when applying updates. In layman terms you simply download the information you need instead of all information contained in a package. The amount of download savings will vary but from what I've heard from people who make use of Presto the savings can be quite significant, up to a 90% in some cases. This will allow dial-up users to finally update their Fedora 11 installs and also result in huge savings for people who pay for their bandwidth. This is a very cool addition to the Fedora system that shows a dedication to their entire user-base - not just the ones lucky enough to have high-speed and/or free bandwidth.

The biggest thing you will notice missing in Fedora 11 are non-free applications and codecs. They are not 'missing' per-se but left out purposely. Fedora operates on a fairly strict guideline of using 'open' or 'free' software and adhering to this philosophy means certain non-free components must be left out of the Fedora 11 default install.

 If you are like me there are several non-free components that you must have to make your system meet your needs, and I will explain how to do this in a moment. First, I would like to remind my readers that our long term goal, as Linux enthusiasts, should be to find 'open' or 'free' alternatives to these non-free components. We are not there yet, but in time I hope we will be able to meet all our needs using only Open Source components. Now I will climb off my soapbox and explain how to enable both the free and non-free RPM Fusion repositories. The RPM Fusion repositories are solid and will enable you to access most proprietary multimedia content.

To enable the RPM Fusion repositories simply visit the RPM Fusion Configuration page and follow the directions. Once you have completed this procedure anytime you encounter a multimedia file that requires a non-free component you will be given the option to let Fedora install it for you. Pretty straightforward!