Installing on Red Hat, Fedora, or CentOS Linux

Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS have a relationship similar to that of Debian and Ubuntu. Red Hat (https://www.redhat.com/en) is the original company behind this distribution, producing its first release in 1995. In addition to making improvements in the graphical interface and overall management of Linux, Red Hat is known for its RPM (Red Hat Package Management) technology. In this corner of the Linux world, packages are bundled into files with the extension *.rpm, and contain installation instructions, which makes the installation, updating, and management of Linux software much easier.

Fedora (https://getfedora.org/) is a free open source version of what is now RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Fedora and the Fedora Project are sponsored by Red Hat, and serve as a test bed for innovation, which, when stable, is ported to RHEL. Fedora Linux releases tend to have rapid development cycles and short lifespans. CentOS (https://www.centos.org/) is also affiliated with Red Hat, and is allowed direct use of RHEL source code. The main difference is that CentOS is free, but support is only available via the community (which is to say, you are on your own!). For the purposes of this book we will use CentOS version 7.