Fedora 17

I know. This is a Debian forum. But this forum is the only one that gets read much. I just wanted people to know that Fedora 17 is now available for Kirkwood devices like the Dockstar, Pogo, Sheeva, etc. I haven't tried it personally yet...

But here is the link any way:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora_17_GA

You can use the ARMv7 hfp version on the A10. I will try to get around to trying F17 on the A10, and at some point making a bootable SD card image for it....

Kirkwood ARMv5 images:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Kirkwood

I don't think that Fedora has any multimedia support yet. That makes it fairly useless for me...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2012 01:30PM by gnexus.

well i got it to work

set bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda2 rootwait'
set loadInitrd 'fatload usb 0:1 0x7400000 uInitrd-kirkwood'
set loadImage 'fatload usb 0:1 0x6400000 uImage-kirkwood'
set bootcmd 'usb start; ${loadImage}; ${loadInitrd} ; bootm 0x6400000 0x7400000'

Will let you boot fedora

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Kirkwood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMJyFdY7O68&feature=player_embedded

I have it working also. Took a bit of work. But it runs a bit better than Debian and boots and shuts down way faster.

The advantage (and drawback) of Fedora is it always uses bleeding-edge packages and new stuff. Therefore on something like F17 on Kirkwood you need to be sure that you have the rootfs in your fstab as rw. Otherwise it will mount read-only.

Unfortunately there is still no Fedora-arm support for ATrpms yet. So if you are dealing with any restricted multimedia files you must build your own packages from the sources if you are up to it. Also the php-fpm package is not available for F17. I'm using php-fcgi instead and it works fine, but is slightly slower. The php-fpm package has been built for F18 and will be in it when that version is released in November. Those things currently make Fedora a no-go for me on my main GoFlex servers.

I will be happy when Fedora-arm is fully ported to ARM with ATrpms. I use it on all my x86 systems and it would be nice to have a consistent install across all archs. Not to mention that it usually runs better until the Fedora upgrades break things ;)

I tried Fedora 17 on my GoFlex Net. First problem is that it didn't boot. Kernel did not give any output via serial console (although console=/dev/ttyS0 was passed as bootargs...). So I booted it using Arch Linux ARM kernel 3.5.1.
First problem was that boot failed because it couldn't mount /boot/uboot (seems like mounting VFAT is not supported out of the box?), but after removing this line from fstab, it booted just fine.
It would be nice to use Fedora on my GoFlex since I'm using it on all other machines as well, but I think it is a bit bloated. My Arch Linux installation takes about 130 MiB while Fedora takes nearly 500 MiB. I think Fedora just installs too much software I don't need by default. Systemd seems to be really nice, but I don't know if it's really needed for my GoFlex.
So I don't think Fedora is an option for me. Maybe I'll test it again when Spherical Cow comes out.
Just a small question left: Does Fedora's kernel have device-specific patches supporting GoFlex arcnumber applied? I wasn't able to check since Fedora's stock kernel didn't work for me...

I have to correct myself. I didn't read correctly... My Arch Linux rootfs uses 1.3 GiB and not 0.13 GiB. Obviously Fedora isn't that bloated...

Fedora has a lot of unneeded dependencies. That is my biggest complaint. A good example is the modem-manager package. It is a Network-manager dependency. It can be removed in Debian, but not in Fedora. Another good example is the kernel package. I always build my own kernel, but fedora still makes me install a huge kernel package and the headers too.

I would rather have a lot of unneeded dependencies than a broken system due to missing ones. Storage is cheap. My time is not, and Debian is easily broken by missing dependencies. But the dependencies make Fedora unsuitable for NAND use.