Red Hat last month released the Fedora Core 6 LiveCD. The tools used to create it can also be used to create your own custom LiveCDs.
It's designed to look identitical to the full release of Fedora Core 6, having Gnome 2.16 and X.org 7.16.
Very nice. But how come it took Red Hat so long to create one? LiveCDs have been a feature of Linux for quite some time now, and so Red Hat is simply playing catch-up in this respect.
I find that Fedora has been falling behind the other distros lately anyway, in terms of features. Ubuntu seems to hog the market, although it's not under huge development either. In my opinion, Red Hat has got the first intended market. The server market. It's solid, stable, and although bloated is usually intended to run on powerful servers so this isn't a problem.
Ubuntu has got the consumer market, but its server version is still quite immature. So, for Red Hat to become a consumer distro they must create more appealing features, such as stripping it down a bit for people who don't have the fastest computers, and including attractive software to save users the trouble of downloading it.
In some cases, this is true of Red Hat. In fact, they specialize in including heaping tons of software in the installation. With this LiveCD release, they include software such as AbiWord and OpenOffice. Which is good.
I think part of the problem with Red Hat is they include too much fluff, because if they removed some of the not-so-good packages from the main installation screen, users would use the higher quality stuff and wouldn't clog their hard drive with the useless crap that is found too-often on Linux installations.
And this only becomes more of a problem on a LiveCD. Now, the computer has to read all the data from the CD, so if Fedora ran slow from a hard drive installation... don't even think about running Fedora from the CD. Even Ubuntu offers a stripped-down version dubbed Xubuntu.
So although Red Hat is finally moving forward with the LiveCD, it's also showing that they've got some catching up to do.