Fedora Core 4 was released Monday morning. I had it running on three machines at home early Sunday evening thanks to some early BitTorrent leaks.

Judging by the traffic on some of the Fedora mailing lists, future releases may not even try to evade leaks getting out to the BitTorrent community. Instead, torrents will be available to the public and mirror operators ahead of the official release date.

I guess it's the old adage, "If you can't lick em' join em'."

With FC4 out, I had to update my document on running Fedora Core on the HP Pavilion zv5000z.

Overall impressions

Overall, FC4 rocks! I was able to get it up and running on the laptop very quickly and with nearly none of the fuss I had to go through to get FC3 working.

One very significant change, I think, is that yum now uses SQLite for its data backend and it has dramatically improved performance.

Some other very cool things include the first inclusion of a Free (as in speech) and open source Java development environment and the Eclipse IDE to go along with it!

The Fedora Project has opened the fedora-extras repository right away, which includes lots of, well, extra stuff.

As of this writing, FreshRPMs.net hasn't published information about their Stentz repository yet, but I found I could install the freshrpms-release RPM from http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/4/freshrpms-release/ and yum could start using the FreshRPMs repository.

I still haven't found an xmms-mp3 RPM yet, but I did get xine, mplayer, and frozen-bubble already.

Great work!