As newer distributions appear, older ones have to retire. This will happen with Fedora 7 on the so-called unlucky day of June 13, 2008 (one month after the release of Fedora 9). The end of life actually means that Fedora 7 users will not receive security/critical fixes and software updates anymore.

Codenamed "Moonshine", Fedora 7 was announced on May 31st, 2007 by Max Spevack (project leader at that time). From this release, users could build fully-customized Fedora distributions, along with third-party packages. It introduced a couple of great features and technologies at that point in time, such as rock solid wireless networking support, wireless firmware, fast user switching, RandR 1.2, KVM virtualization support, new init system, the replacement of syslog with syslog-ng, improved firewire support, real-time and tickless kernel support, and encrypted file systems.

Fedora 7 was one of the big steps in the development of this Linux operating system. Before it, there were only two main repositories - Core and Extras. The first one had the base packages necessary for the system to function correctly. It also contained other packages that were distributed along with the installation media. The second repository, Extras, was maintained by the community and the packages included in it were not distributed with the Fedora CD/DVDs. Fedora 7 united these two repositories, and dropped the "Core" part from its name (before this, the name of the distribution was Fedora Core 3, 4, etc.).

What is Fedora? The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products and it is not a supported product of Red Hat. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community in order to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.

If you haven't upgraded yet to Fedora 8, you can download it right now from Softpedia or you can test the latest development release of Fedora 9 from here.