Fedora (previously called Fedora Core) is an RPM-based, general purpose Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

The Fedora Project offered a peek under its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of time after its release.

"I have been using Fedora (formerly known as Fedora Core) since the first version came out. Following a bad experience with Fedora Core 2, I stuck to the odd numbered versions - invoking the Star Trek movie rule in reverse."

For the last two years Max Spevack has lead the Fedora Project through many changes. Now, he has decided it's time for him to move on to other areas and so a new leader has been found: Paul Frields. Paul, coming into the role from the position of a community contributor, is already well known and has some exciting new ideas resulting from his previous experiences. In this interview we catch up with both Max and Paul as they discuss their experiences of the Fedora Project Leader job, the project's past and its future.

Today I’d like to talk about my experiences with Fedora 12 over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been running it as my main desktop and really getting a feel for how it ticks. Fedora is the community release from corporate Linux giants Red Hat. I’ve used it on and off since its inception back in the early 2000’s, it’s fair to say there have been big highs and lows in that time.

Fedora 15 Xfce is a Fedora 15 Spin. In Fedoraland, a Spin is an alternate edition of Fedora, “tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.” Presently, five Spins have been released. These are, in order of popularity, the KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Security and Games Spins.

"There is an immense number of virtualization improvements and features in this release," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields told InternetNews.com. "These things will affect anyone using virtualization across the board." Virtualization has been a big push this year for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT).

The Fedora Project has released Fedora 9, a significant upgrade for the popular Linux distribution. Fedora 9 packs in a number of new features including an improved package management system, KDE 4 and more.

It's almost time for Fedora 13 feature freeze and we hardly expect any new last minute additions. With most accepted Fedora 13 features highlighted on Fedora Project Wiki we decided to provide a comprehensive preview of the Linux distribution.