No distribution’s installer makes setting up disk encryption as easy as Anaconda, the Fedora system installer. And that has not changed in Fedora 16, the latest stable release. On previous versions of Fedora, those released before Fedora 16, the only automated disk partitioning option was one based on LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem.

Due to all the attention that is put on Ubuntu releases, it is often easy to miss what is going on in another distribution, such as Fedora. Fedora, too, though has some interesting features coming in Fedora 11, which should be out in May.

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware.

Fedora 11 has been released, it has faster performance and new security, virtualization, desktop and server features

While every Fedora fans enjoy the newly released Fedora 11 Linux-based operating system, the developers are working hard on the next release, Fedora 12, due for release in November-December 2009.

This month, however, I had a chance to install and test Fedora 7, the latest community-based release from the folks at Red Hat. Fedora and Novell's OpenSuse are Ubuntu Linux's two chief "competitors," if you care to frame things that way.

There has not been a new development release of Fedora 12 since the Constantine Alpha release back in August. However, the second and last development release, Fedora 12 Beta, is set to be released next week. It has been delayed a few times already, but Fedora 12 Beta packs all of the features that are to be found in Fedora 12 with the final development freeze already in effect.

With the impending release and the current development freeze, we took the compose release candidate for Fedora 12 x86_64 and have looked at how its performance compares to Ubuntu 9.10. In this article are our results, which actually show some rather large differences between Fedora and Ubuntu when it comes to the speed of the Linux desktop.