Leonidas (either named after the king of Sparta who led his troops to victorious annihilation in the Peloponnese or the chain of chocolate shops), is the 11th release of the Fedora operating system. Along the way there have been a few duds, but in recent times Fedora has been really delivering on its promise of the four Fs: "Freedom, Friends, Features, First". Fedora 10 was a rock-steady release that introduced a slew of new features, and Leonidas is promising more of the same.

Other smart folk were quick off the bat to review Fedora 11, but we're not like that. Instead, it takes us a few weeks to properly settle down into a distro to see what we make of it. Read on for our findings, then read the comments to our earlier post to see what other people think...

Installing the system is as straightforward as you could possibly hope. Installers usually tread the fine line between making the process easy and supplying the advanced options that power users need. The only area where Fedora 11 possibly falls down is the disk space provisioning: the default option at install time is always to hijack the main boot drive or replace an existing Linux install. The custom route leads you into a graphical parted system, which, while comprehensive, is not often as easy to follow as you might wish. At least it handles all sorts of storage, including iSCSI.