Other examples of projects built from a set of RPM packages for FC4 are contained in books, such as Linux Toys II by Christopher Negus (Wiley Publishing, 2005). Besides featuring a custom MythTV entertainment PC (built by Tom Weeks), the book includes Fedora RPM packages for building an Internet Radio station featuring Icecast streaming audio (www.icecast.org) and doing X10 home automation with HeyU (http://heyu.tanj.com/).

The Unfree
Now we're into an area that makes Open Source purists cringe: running Windows apps on Linux.

While Fedora Core doesn't contain the software needed to run Windows programs, there are several software packages that can be added to Fedora to run many of them. So if one or two Windows apps are keeping you from moving to Fedora, here are some software initiatives you can try:

• WINE: The WINE project (www.winehq.com) has been making great strides in getting applications created for Microsoft Windows to run on Linux and other operating systems. WINE isn't really an emulator, because it doesn't emulate the entire Windows operating system. Instead, because it implements Win32 application programming interfaces (APIs) and Windows 3.x interfaces, WINE is more of a "Windows compatibility layer." You can download WINE free of charge from several different Web sites. Check winehq.com for a list of download sites. I downloaded the latest RPMs built for Fedora Core 4 at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wine/.
• Win4Lin: Win4Lin (www.win4lin.com) is a commercial product for running a Windows system in Linux. You can try the software free for 14 days. Installation takes three steps: Installing Win4Lin (available in RPM format), installing the guest operating system (Windows 98, 2000, ME or XP), and setting up a guest session. Then you run a full Windows system from a Linux desktop, installing and running any Windows applications you choose.
• QEMU: QEMU (www.qemu.org) is an Open Source project that acts like a processor emulator. It can either emulate a full system or work in user-mode emulation (where it can be used to test processes compiled for different CPUs). In full system emulation, QEMU can run a variety of operating systems, including Windows 3.11, 95, 98SE, ME, 2000, and possibly XP. To try applications intended for other operating systems, QEMU can also run several Linux (Fedora, KNOPPIX, Mandrake, Morphix, Debian, and others) and other Unix-like systems (NetBSD, Solaris, and others).

Hopefully, with the stuff I've just described, you'll be able to find the software you have been missing and get it running in Fedora.