Fedora 7 Test 3 – featuring KDE live CD

Fedora 7 Test 3 was released today. This release included for the first time a Fedora live CD featuring KDE.

This live CD is something special. Of course, Ubuntu and Suse already have such desktop orientated spin-off, but Fedora never had. This was due to the fact that Fedora was mainly focussed on Gnome. This even lead to situations were simple bugs weren’t fixed despite patches were provided.

To address this problem a “Special Interest Group” was founded inside the Fedora community. This KDE SIG now manages all KDE related topics and tries to improve the situation. This is done by providing more important KDE packages to the repositories, by improving the quality of the current packages – but also by creating a KDE live CD spin-off of Fedora.

And although the Live CD is still in development, it already was in a pretty good shape. And especially for me it is very comfortable to now have a live CD which features exactly what I use usually on my private machine: KDE on Fedora.

As you can see the boot sequence is pretty easy: you can either boot the live CD directly, or load it into RAM and eject the CD itself (which, of course, requires sufficient RAM). The only thing missing here is an option to boot from hard disk, but that might be added in future versions. At the moment, that option is not available in the “livecd-creator” tool.

After the boot processed finished, you are greeted with a typical KDE screen with the slick new Fedora 7 wallpapers.

As you can see the iconset used is a mixture of crystal (default KDE) and bluecurve (default Gnome-Fedora). I was told that this is the current default in Fedora’s KDE pacakges, and I think that will be changed in the future.

This live CD also feature the Fedora installer to install the system to the hard drive.

Of course, all these functions and the CD itself are not stable yet – there is still lots of work todo, not only for the KDE spin-off but for the underlying live CD system in general. Also, this is the first KDE live CD – don’t be surprised if you find teething problems.

If you want to give it a try, get the live CD from the usual mirrors or via bittorrent. You can burn and run it on your own PC or test it in a Virtual Machine like VirtualBox.
Please report all errors and bugs at the Red Hat bugzilla against the component LiveCD.