Seneca breaks silence on Fedora Remix

Better late than never I guess. I think I downloaded this somewhere, now i've got my pi perhaps i'll load it up and see how broken it is.

If it is badly broken, how did it get released ? Or is that a silly question ?

Steve,

  That isn't a silly question.  Fedora is supposedly the primary OS for this device,

so care should have been taken by all parties involved, to ensure that it worked

reasonably well.

  Apparently from what I can gather, the foundation isn't putting much funding into

development of Fedora.  Seneca lists their sponsors, but doesn't include the

foundation.  The foundation has apparently provided one alpha board, but no

beta boards.  I don't know about production boards.

  The development at Seneca was apparently done in connection with a class,

SBR600 taught by Chris Tyler:

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/SBR600

The problems with the Remix were found immediately upon release, and

included problems with login, and problems setting timezone.  The login

problem apparently happens if the RPi is booted without being connected

to the network to set its time/date.  So it appears that no beta testing was done

by anyone in a different timezone than Seneca, or by anyone without a network

connection at boot time.

Other problems, such as general slowness and needing frequent reboots

may have been known at time of release, but may have been deferred in order

to meet the launch schedule.  These problems may be more difficult to fix.

I believe the login and timezone problems involved simple scripting errors

involving lifetime of environment variables.

I think much of the RPi work at Seneca was piggybacking on work for OLPC,

but I think OLPC is moving to ARM version 7,  at least for its newer machines.

We have yet to be told if Fedora will continue to be the primary OS,

and if so, what level of support will be provided, particularly in the way of

security updates and bugfix updates.  The lack of any support or updates

so far is not encouraging.

RaspberryPi org's downloads page no longer even lists Fedora 14 Remix - until recently it had noted that it was buggy and recommended Debian Squeeze instead, so from the Downloads page at least Debian Squeeze is the defacto standard.  Chris Tyler's CDOT group at Seneca do seem to be gearing up for two imminent releases, a new build of Fedora 17 due May 24, and some fixes and updates for 14 - source is this meeting from their wiki: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Fedora_ARM_Meeting_2012_May_02

RedHat Charges $299 a year for a subcription for a fully supported version of Red Hat Enpterprice Linux for workstations on x86. How much are you willing to pay for an fully supported version of GNU/linux for ARM so that you actually have the right to demand an stable, bug-free and constantly updated release?

Hasn't this kind of missed the boat now?

I started with the Debian build and I am quite happy with it.  I don't think I'll be bothering with it myself.

Even if they fix all the bugs will it really be worth using?

The beauty of Linux and opensource is that there are flavors for all tastes and tastes for all flavors.

IMHO that's also probably its biggest weakness.  As a relative newcomer to Linux, I think the choice has delayed me from getting into Linux for years.

IMHO that's also probably its biggest weakness.  As a relative newcomer to Linux, I think the choice has delayed me from getting into Linux for years.

Given the relative lack of power of Raspberry Pi's CPU and its poor support for disk storage, I expect the "best" distro for the Pi to end up being the one that is most cut down and optimized.  It's far too early to tell which this will be, but I strongly suspect that it won't be any of the usual desktop distros because they're the opposite of cut down and optimized.

For experts, a distro is probably defined by its package manager, but if a bespoke Pi distro were to base itself on RedHat, Debian or Ubuntu packages, would it still be RedHat, Debian or Ubuntu?

Perhaps not, because from a user's perspective, "normal" distros tend to be defined by their desktops.  You might think that the character of a distro could be preserved despite the slimming down, but once you've thrown out the bulk of a horrendously bloated desktop manager, what you're left with is something quite different.  A newbie user of that desktop distro may not recognize their surroundings anymore.

It's undoubtedly a contentious issue, but the big distros are probably defined by their desktop bloat.

Morgaine.