While Fedora Core 7 is getting ready for release in May 24th, 2007, Fedora Core 5 prepares for June 29th, 2007, the last day for it to benefit from some updates. Due to a decision made by the Fedora Board and Red Hat Engineering, the period of supported updates for any Fedora release was increased by several months. Therefore, under the old policy, Fedora Core 5 should have had a lifetime of only 11 months compared to 15 as it would have now.

Fedora Core (or simply Fedora) is an RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) based Linux distribution developed and supported by the Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. In fact, Fedora derives from the original Red Hat distribution and it contains only free and open source software. While Red Hat Linux started releasing the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) for the commercial users, Fedora appeared more as an operating system for the casual users.

Fedora Core 5 was released on March 20, 2006 under the Bordeaux codename. FC5 brought some new important tools and packages to the previous releases such as beagle, a desktop search interface, or pup, a package management tool.

Fedora Core 7 is expected to make a difference compared to the previous versions through the merging of the Core and Extras repository, the implementation of GNOME version 2.18 and through its new theme, called "Flying High". FC7 will be the first Fedora release to feature spins (a Fedora release aimed for a specific kind of user) such as Live, Prime, KDE and Everything.