From the ‘Good Things Come in Small Packages’ files:
You can now add another Linux distro to the list that will run on the Raspberry Pi. The core distro for the small device is the Debian based Raspian and there is also an Arch based Linux for the Pi too.
And now once again, we’ve got a Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi as well.
Dubbed Pidora – the distro is a new ARMv6 build of Fedora 18.
Fedora didn’t just port the arch, the Pidora spin also has been specifically compiled for Pi’s hardware and there are specifical module for the graphical firstboot for it as well.
The Pidora effort was not undertaken by Red Hat staff, it was build by Fedora community members at Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology in North Toronto. Seneca’s relationship with Fedora is no surprise to many, in fact fudcon was held up at Seneca a few years back (the only fudcon i’ve actually been too!)
Chris Tyler at Seneca noted that:
Pidora contains a number of Raspberry Pi-specific Python modules and native libraries, such as WiringPi, bcm2835, and python-rpi.gpio. The kernel is also compiled to expose the Raspberry Pi interfaces such as I2C, SPI, serial, and GPIO, and several of these can be accessed with /sys file interfaces (even from bash) without using any special libraries or modules. In addition, Pidora contains Raspberry Pi-specific utilities and libraries for access to the Broadcom Videocore IV GPU.
I think it’s great that Fedora is back on the Raspberry Pi, I think it’s even better that the work is being done in Toronto. The Seneca team is no stranger to ARM and had been operating the Fedora ARMv5tel/armv7hl build farm over the past three years.
“The armv5tel/armv7hl build systems were successfully relocated to new enterprise ARM systems at the Fedora data centre facility in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year,” Tyler said. “The armv6hl build systems will remain in Toronto since there is no intention to make armv6hl an official Fedora secondary architecture.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.