Fedora reaching out to new niches

Purpose-built Fedora distributions, called "spins", are a recent addition to that community in an attempt to reach additional users. The idea is to use tools like Revisor to create a custom collection of software that work well together for a particular set of tasks. This collection can then be installed or run from a live CD, providing an easy means to have the right collection of tools immediately, rather than after a lengthy yum install pass.

The concept itself is not new, there are many distributions targeted at a particular subset of users. Typically, other popular distributions (Debian and Ubuntu in particular) have been used as the basis for them. The Fedora project is embracing the idea, pulling together a list of the spins and elevating at least two to the status of "official spins". The idea is to appeal to those who don't want to be bothered with tracking down, installing, and configuring the tools needed for their task; instead it is all packaged for them.

Starting with Fedora 7, two official releases of the distribution are available, one for each of the dominant desktops. For Fedora 8, there will also be a developer spin, which has the explicit goal of attracting more Fedora developers. It will include Eclipse, perhaps other integrated development environments (IDEs), gcc and friends, emacs, SystemTap, and other developer tools. Other ideas, such as a working Xen virtual machine and targeting web developers, have been discussed as well.

The other official spin for Fedora 8 is the Fedora Electronic Lab (FEL). This project pulls together the tools for electronic design and configures them to work well together. A wide variety of software for circuit simulation, hardware development in VHDL and Verilog, Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, and embedded systems development are included. Universities are high on the list of target audiences, with the FEL website claiming 250 universities already using Fedora; attracting more is one of the goals.

Several other spins are being worked on as well, not "officially", but there does seem to be some serious work going into them. The Security LiveCD is a Fedora 7 based spin for security auditing and testing. It contains all of the tools that an administrator or security researcher might need to do forensic analysis of a rooted machine, check a network for vulnerable hosts, or do penetration testing. Since it can be booted directly from a read-only device, risks of infection from any malware are eliminated. Any machine can be quickly turned into a security workstation by using a distribution like this.

Another ambitious project is the Fedora Art Studio. This spin not only collects the tools into one package, it also pulls in content likely to be useful to artists, desktop publishers, animators, and other creative folks. There are collections of clip art, fonts, textures, brushes, and so on, all with free licenses. There are also tutorials included to get people up to speed on the various packages. Plans are to include default Firefox bookmarks for useful sites as well.

Other spins are listed on the site, ranging from the Creative Commons LiveContent spin (covered by LWN here) to a SystemTap live CD. The Fedora wiki has various Howtos on remixing and rebranding Fedora, as well as using the Live CD tools. Most people who want to build a custom spin will start by using the Revisor GUI tool, which provides options for installation, live or virtualization (for Xen or KVM virtual machines) media for CDs, DVDs, USB thumb drives and more. The project has clearly put a lot of time and effort into making it as easy as possible to create new spins from the large repository of Fedora software.

It remains to be seen if any of these spins become popular, but it may be a good way to introduce new users to Fedora. It is unlikely that power users will find a spin that covers all of what they use, but they just might find one that serves as a good starting point. They can either customize their own spin from there or use the usual repository tools to grab whatever extras they need. For a distribution that, until recently, had a reputation for not working with the community, this effort may go a long way towards erasing that history.