Fedora Core is a completely free, user friendly, and secure general purpose platform based on Linux. Fedora Core 6 is the latest version of the free and popular Fedora Core platform with a number of unique features and significant improvements over previous versions.

Some of the new features are:

• Desktop
  There are a variety of additions to Fedora Core 6 that will be interesting to Desktop users, including:
  • A new default font and theme, courtesy of the Fedora Artwork Project.
  • The Compiz window manager provides better visual feedback and a variety of desktop effects, using the AIGLX framework. More information is available from the Fedora Rendering Project.
  • Enhancements in package management by way of pirut and yum-updatesd, which combine to provide a notification applet, alerting the user when there is updated software available.
  • A rewritten system-config-printer tool, which has several new features. Devices are detected on-demand as necessary, and support for per-user queues is available, so users can customize their printer settings without having to modify system-wide configurations. Additional technical details are available here and here.
  • GNOME 2.16 and KDE 3.5.4, as well as the latest upstream versions of many standard open source applications, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
  • Fedora Core 6 includes Dogtail which provides a graphical test and automation framework.
  • Totem has replaced Helix Player as the default media player in Fedora Core 6.
• Performance
  • All Fedora Core applications have been rebuilt using `DT_GNU_HASH`, which provides a significant performance boost for applications using dynamic linking.
  • IMAP support for the Evolution personal information manager is much improved in this release.
  • This release improves performance and manageability by splitting up package dependencies in a much more granular way. Affected packages include beagle, evince, and NetworkManager. For more information on these and other related changes, refer to Docs/Beats/PackageNotes.
  • In this release, the performance of yum, Pirut, and Pup has been significantly improved.
  • Fontconfig 2.4 improves startup performance and memory footprint significantly.
  • The performance of the Fedora's default ext3 filesystem has been boosted in recent versions of the Linux kernel.
  • A new background service caches and increases the performance of network filesystems such as AFS and NFS.
  • CUPS printing service starts much more faster since it now detects devices on demand.
• System Administration
  • Arguably the most useful new feature in Fedora Core 6 is the improvements that have been made to anaconda, the Fedora installer. At install-time, the user can specify third-party repositories, and if your install is network-aware, Fedora can reach out to those repositories and pull in additional packages. The obvious use case is integartion with Fedora Extras, marking Fedora Core 6 as the release that begins to lessen the separation between "Core" and "Extras" at install-time.
  • IPv6 is supported in anaconda.
  • A graphical virtualization manager is included to simply the creation and management of virtualized systems.
  • SELinux is enhanced by means of a graphical troubleshooting tool and enhancements to the Nautilus file manager.
  • Fedora now features integrated smart card capabilities, for secure authentication out of the box using the new Cool Key system.
  • This release introduces a new tool, lvm2-cluster, for intuitively managing cluster volumes.
• System Level Changes
  • Fedora Core 6 ships with the 2.6.18 Linux kernel, and there are no longer separate kernels for multi-processor and single-processor architectures. A single kernel now automatically detects your processor configuration and "does the right thing".
  • X.org 7.1 is included, and it dynamically configures monitor resolution and refresh rates to limit the amount of required user configuration.
  • Fedora Core 6 runs on Intel-based Macs.
  • Improved i18n support using the default SCIM input method, including more languages such as Sinhalase (Sri Lanka) and Oriya, Kannada, and Malayalam (India). Fedora now provides an easy interface to switch the input methods using im-chooser.
  • The GNOME 1.x legacy stack has been removed from Fedora Core, and added to Fedora Extras.

x86_64 - DVD Only 1 Bootable DVD Supports AMD64 (Athlon64 and Opteron) and Intel EM64T