Fedora is being used in a hundred thousand interesting places out in the real world.
- At NASA to do analysis that makes future space exploration safer.
- In studies to improve development for children with Down’s Syndrome (trisomy 21).
- At Creative Commons, to promote open content discovery, creation, and remixing.
- Powering distribution of food to the needy in Mexico.
We want to hear a story about how YOU use Fedora to do something interesting. Enriching. Educational. Enhancing. At work or in your community. How did Fedora help you achieve something special? Just reply in a comment to this blog.
I’m using Fedora at work as the basis for IP video surveillance systems. They are used everywhere from small shops to the police (in Switzerland). It’s maybe not Enriching nor Educational, but it works damn fine 🙂
I’m using Fedora to facilitate the Free Linux PC project the Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group. This program targets people without computers, particularly those with school-age children. While historically using a flavor of Ubuntu the program required lots of ‘techies’ to spend hours installing on each single machine. When I became involved I saw that as a huge waste of time, so I spun up a few instances of Cobbler on Fedora and began pre-installing machines with Fedora and a wide selection of educational and productivity software. This let me setup a number of machines ahead of time with basically nothing but plugging the machine in and setting it to PXE boot, a far cry from the constant babysitting that was required. While this experience was merely the pilot, we’ll be rolling Fedora and Cobbler to our repository of computers and letting some of our retired volunteers get our mass of donated machines ready to be distributed.
See the report of this pilot event at:
//www.nalley.sc/david/?p=48
See the project itself at:
//freelinuxpc.org/
See the LUG that operates the project:
//uclug.org
I’m using Fedora as a thin client server for a school. With one single PC running Fedora I manage to give service to +25 thin clients which is a great saving in hardware and staff costs. People stare in amazement when they see that realtime audio and video is also possible on the thinclients.
I’m using Fedora at work to develop software in support of the Canadian Army.
We, the AllemaniACs RoboCup Team, are using Fedora to power or soccer and service robots. You can see our website at //robocup.rwth-aachen.de.
We are using a custom software system based on Fedora. What really makes Fedora our distribution of choice is the wealth of add-on software and that these packages are well maintained – and if something is wrong is pretty easy to fix it or to get it fixed thanks to all the excellent contributors. We made it world champion with Fedora as our base, even twice 🙂 Of course we are using it for all machines at our institute and on all laptops as well, no exceptions. Fedora shows its qualities as a desktop on these machines.
We contribute back by maintaining several packages that are of interest for us.
I’m using Fedora 8 at work to monitor all Solaris, Red Hat and some Windows servers with Nagios.
I’m using Fedora 8 at home as my media center, mythtv, to record TV program and listen radio.
Steven’s example was something like I was going to post — I was doing similar embedded/video stuff at my last job — with Fedora. We should do more to showcase Fedora as an embedded development platform — and find out how to host projects in Fedora Hosted that make that even easier. There’s also usage all over for different embedded topics.
We are using Fedora 8 as the base for our thin client OS TLCOS – ThinLinc Client OS. The purpose is to provide a minimal runtime environment for the ThinLinc client. This OS is freely available to our customers and commonly used in schools. It allows them to convert old PCs to thin terminals. This solution is very cheap and means that the number of terminals can be increased, thus proving access to the system for many pupils at the same time.
Fedora 8 is great since it’s a modular and modern system. The hardware support is good. Customizations are easy. For example, although not a standard TLCOS feature, we have created versions that includes local scanner access, using the SANE software included in Fedora.
Peter Ã?strand,
ThinLinc Chief Developer
A friend came to me with a WinXP laptop
having an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
error with a loop of start and restart. The
Toshiba recovery disk did not offer “fdisk c: /
fixmbr” just reinstall. She hadn’t backed up.
I used fedora 9 rawhide on a USB one-gigabyte
thumb drive to access c: and back up her files.
I chose Fedora after testing out Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Mandriva for my main OS for my linux blog, //linuxglobe.wordpress.com. My hope is to find other Writers who are curious about linux to work with me in promoting linux to everyday folks in North America as well as IT folks. The ultimate goal is to tranform my blog into a national north american based linux magazine with a free dvd attached sold on newsstands everywhere in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. There is a niche that needs to be filled and Fedora can help me reach for the stars!
Happy Birthday to Fedora who turns 9 in May!
Mark McLaughlin / Hudson, MA, USA
Looks like some other people left their comments at the Red Hat Magazine post, found here.
I use Fedora for desktop applications related to communication to a unix medical server for a medical practice management system called S.M.I.L.E. I also use Fedora systems to manage firewalls, gateways, dchp, mail, and name servers that connect three remote offices over the internet. All of these machines were first put together by removing MS Windows. Wow… I love you Fedora !!!!
Not sure which bucket this falls in, but I think we’re one of the few that uses fedora 8 out here in China for our Chinese personalized recommendations engine application. ubuntu seems to be the linux distro of choice out here…but fedora has been fantastic for us!
I am using Fedora 8 at home. Initially it was just for personal mail, webserver and helping connect my interal network. Now I host a basketball association website (//nigfba.lexnik.com) which tracks schedules, scores and standings for the team. Fedora has came a long way…I have ran every version starting with RH6, RH7, RH8 then into the Fedora Cores and now just Fedora.
I’m the Technology Coordinator for a 1400 student school district in California. I have been using Fedora since Redhat 5 and currently have 7 Fedora 3 to Fedora 8 servers running in the school district. I use them for web, mail, IM, file sharing, and currently an IP camera surveillance server at our high school. I have also been using Fedora as my personal computing system both at work and at home. It’s a great system and gets easier to install with every release.
I use Fedora 8 to monitor various network resources, such as app servers, web servers and file servers using MRTG. I also use it for offline data crunching.
We run a public facing web server on Fedora.
I use it as my primary desktop environment at home where I surf the web and process simple video clips from my MythTV configuration.
At the Spinal Cord Research Centre, we use Fedora for A/D data capture and analysis of electrophysiology data. We use UEI PowerDAQ cards and custom-developed Linux software, mostly written in C. We started out with Red Hat 6.2 and moved through subsequent Red Hat Linux and Fedora versions through the years (since 2001). While we switched most of our production systems over to Scientific Linux 5 (a RHEL 5 clone) recently for longer-term support and updates, I still like to develop on Fedora, including rawhide on my primary test system, to stay ahead of the curve with the latest versions of the compiler, libraries and kernel.
How’s this for a story?
I’ve recently run Mandriva 2008.1, Debian Lenny. Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora 9. Only Fedora has been able to give me sound “out of the box”.
I’ve got a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS.
That’s hardly an “unusual” card….
So I’d love to know why only Fedora can get this right. 😕
Here in the University of Lleida, we’re in the middle of a migration to open source. I had the mission to choose the distro, and, obviously, since Fedora Core 1 we’re using Fedora.
Right now, 25% of students computers are Fedora Only, 50% dual booting Fedora+Windows.
WRT staff computers, 60% of University Staff uses Fedora as the desktop university system (that’s 250 computers or so). We’re now with Fedora 7, and will upgrade to Fedora 9 (our upgrade cycle is one year, that’s only one every two releases).
I am using fedora for a k12 school network, around 100 desktops and two servers. I’ve setup a server with FC6 and the other server and all the clients on the network are FC7. I do a lot of confirmation before I go to the next release, so am always behind the normal release cycle.
Turns out, all the really smart kids at the school mean that I have to deal with internal security big time! I tried NFS4 but the bugs were numerous on the releases I am using, so I did an internal firewall instead.
I am using Fedora as
1. servers:
a) my homenet (4 workstations – 1 FC6, 1 F8, 2x W2k) one FC5 – local DNS, mailserver, fileserver (SMB), intranet (triade Apache, PHP5,MySQL etc.), LDAP, Nagios
b) local heterogenic network(Municipal District Office Brno-Slatina – 27 workstations W2k, WXP, F8, FC5) two FC5 – DNS, S&D DHCP, mailserver, LDAP, DB server, fileserver, intranet, Nagios etc.
2. desktop workstations (mail, internet, office app., multimedia, programming etc.).
For running other OS in Fedora workstations I use virtualization only, but rather VirtualBox than Xen (problems with xen kernel actualization & corresp. NVidia drivers by Livna).
We use Fedora at “united dispatching control board of the power supply systems”. In other words, in some kind of “heavy” production environment.
Such a use might seem strange (why not RHEL?), but there are some circumstances which allow it.
Such kind of environment implies an existence of high skilled engineers, who do all the support and who work full day immediately near the corresponding hardware. These engineers must not trust any external opinions, they must check out each update to be installed etc. And they must be capable to fix (and hack) software when it is needed. Besides they must create and support a lot of local specific programs. If so, it seems that they are capable to do the whole Linux support themselves, therefore they just not need any external support (like RHEL support).
Such kind of environments implies high availability, which mean that there are several servers for each critical application, i.e. at least two mail-servers, two dns etc. This allow to do the changes/updates gradually, step-by-step. (First, change something on one server. If something failed, you have the second working server anyway. If all is OK, do the changes on the second server.) “Several servers for each application” allow to do changes that way faster and more bravely. It means that we can forget about worries of too often changed things in Fedora.
These two circumstances explain why we can use Fedora even in production environment. With all the benefits of the newest stable software (unlike the Enterprise distros, where the change of software is slower to satisfy the external support needs).
In the last 24 hours alone I have used Fedora to: organize, caption (ITPC/EXIF) geolocate and enhance a set of photographs (DIGIKAM suite) from a vacation tour of Texas. As lead web designer for the town Historical Society I used ftp server, http server, MYSQL server and SAMBA to retrieve, test and then post additions and corrections to the work of others on an intranet and on the local historical society’s web site. Of course there is the miscellaneous use of OpenOffice.org for all kinds of business communications. None of this speaks to the numerous other uses to which I have put Fedora before yesterday! These include but are not limited to GIS analysis, academic computer programming, business flow charting, business graphic presentation, you name it!
My only complaint today about Fedora is that I cannot get Netbeans 6.0 to work under F-8 as I did with earlier Netbeans and early FC distros.
I use Fedora as my only operating system because I screwed up my duel boot. but anyway it turned out to be easy to install from a dvd on to my lap top( acer aspire 3000, a real budget box). I knew absolutly nothing about installing operating systems so its default settings are sensible. It worked strait out of the box.
I use it as a play anything portable multimedia player, it’s as good as a commercial one and a fraction of the price. I use it to integrate and also to my writing and graphic design into one box. also to do my Python shape recognition experiments.
We (ElectroMech ) provide solutions based on Redhat based distribution.
I use Fedora8 on my HP Pavilion dv6636nr. With other linux it is slightly problematic to run all the function of this laptop. But with fedora it is wonderful all the function is working fine. Yes I need to update the latest kernel to support nvidia card 7150M. But it wonderful, great improvement GUI and hardware support.
I hope the next update of RHEL5 is also have all the features of Fedora 8 and mostly Fedora 9 too.
I really appreciate Fedora community for great remarkable Distro. Fedora.
We used Fedora as the central controller for our local Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby track. The event was getting too large to handle manually (we usually have 60 to 80 cars at a race), so we made a web application that keeps track of elapsed time readings for each car in each of six lanes.
I currently use Fedora 9 as my primary operating system on my Dell Laptop. In addition, I used Fedora 8 for my Master’s project titled “Secure Jam Resistant Key Transfer: Using the DOD CAC Card to secure a radio link by employing the BBC jam resistant algorithm”
I used the GNU Radio on fedora along with the NSS and coolkey module to perform a PKI key transfer between two Fedora 8 machines using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral. I also set up Dogtag 1.0 to put generate a certificate for a Gemalto 64kv2 Cyberflex smart card that can be used to perform the key transfer. The coolkey applet was used on the card and installed using GP Shell on Fedora 8 as well.
I’ve used Fedora on my laptop since Fedora Core 4, and I don’t think I will ever put any other distribution on–especially since a new release is out every 6 months!