Comparing Fedora and Enterprise Packages

The Fedora Project was set up as a "proving ground " for developing technology that can be used by Red Hat, Inc. to include in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux products. Because the separation of Red Hat Linux into the Fedora Project and Enterprise Linux is still quite new, there is significant overlap between the packages included in the two distributions.

The following bullets are intended to give you a flavor of the differences between the Fedora Core software included with this book and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux software you can purchase from Red Hat, Inc.

Many personal use packages in Fedora are not included in the Enterprise distribution. For example, Enterprise contains fewer packages for playing and ripping music (no cdp, cdda2wav, cdrdao, or grip packages), fewer games (no freeciv, Maelstrom, or tuxracer) and fewer personal productivity tools (no gnucash, gnumeric, abiword, or koffice).
Most packages in Enterprise that are not in Fedora are those that are needed particularly for high-demand, high-availability servers. Enterprise packages not in Fedora include kernel software that can utilize large amounts of RAM (kernel-hugemem), tools for configuring diskless workstations (redhat-config-netboot) and monitoring tools (crash).

Although the timing of the releases of Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 may make some version numbers different, there are literally hundreds of software packages that are the same in the two distributions.