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?

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.

Zeta,

  The level of support I expect depends on what I'm told to expect.

The FAQ on this website says:

"UPDATED AT 12:05 pm GMT 15 March

Q. Why have you temporarily removed the Fedora download?

A. We want you to be up and running as quickly as possible. There are 3 Linux operating systems for the computer and when the Fedora Remix became available, we tested it on our Raspberry Pi to make sure it was easy to use.  We found issues with the username & password authentication that prevented access to the operating system, effectively making it a bit unusable. To be really clear though, this issue is to do with the software, not the Raspberry Pi board itself. We’ve fed this back to the guys at Fedora, and they’re already working on a new release.  When Fedora have fixed the issue, and element14 with the Raspberry Pi foundation have successfully tested it, we’ll bring the Fedora Remix download back to you.  Until then, we recommend the Debian “Squeeze” distribution that’s available in our Download Center."

I gathered from this, and from my understanding that the Seneca SBR600 course was only at "midsemester" when they made the original release, that they would quickly release an update with at least the login and timezone bugs fixed.

On the RPi.org forum, JamesH wrote:

"by jamesh » Mon Mar 12, 2012 8:51 pm

It's been covered before, but Fedora is the recommended/standard distro. This is because we NEED a standardised distro for the educational release - we need people to be able to say -"We are using your distro and your stuff doesn't work", rather than "I've got this random distro I made and your stuff doesn't work". In the first case we know we have a problem. In the second case, all bets are off - could be anything.  

That said, we heartedly encourage people to use whatever distro they want. Just don't expect top level tech support from the Foundation itself, on Foundation released packages. We'll try, but we cannot promise anything on other distros, the support burden is too high."

I gather from this that the foundation does intend to provide top level tech support for their primary distro.

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.

coder27 wrote:

 

 

On the RPi.org forum, JamesH wrote:

"by jamesh » Mon Mar 12, 2012 8:51 pm

 

"... Just don't expect top level tech support from the Foundation itself, on Foundation released packages. We'll try, but we cannot promise anything on other distros, the support burden is too high."

 

 

I gather from this that the foundation does intend to provide top level tech support for their primary distro.

Nowhere they said the Foundation had any intention to provide tech support for any distro. You may expect they offer some help and support when you run Foundation released packages on their Recommended/standard distro. However, the Foundation has not yet released any software package.

I don't really see why they would need to provide too much support when there is such a large following of helpful supporters creating this community.  Surely this is really what makes the Pi so special.

I have seen many other embedded Linux boards, but without a large active community they are not as attractive.  I guess, getting back to my original point, surely what is needed is one main distro that the community are throwing their efforts into.  At present that is probably Debian, so why switch over to Redhat now (or later when it is working a bit better), unless I am missing something and Redhat is the way to go...

I think the closest they got was the mention of a prefered distro which was Fedora but god knows what it is now or will be next week.

Onwards and upwards.... best we all get to gether and sort it ourselves

Zeta,

you wrote:

"Nowhere they said the Foundation had any intention to provide tech support for any distro."

I agree with you that they haven't made an unambigous statement regarding distro support per se,

at least not that I have seen.  But distro support is closely intertwined with package support. 

If for example you can't login to a distro, or if the distro requires frequent reboots, or is overly slow,

as is currently the case with the Fedora Remix,  then that hinders effective use of any educational packages.

So I don't think it's reasonable to interpret their statements as intending to provide good support

for educational packages, but not for the underlying distro.  In fact they have been providing

support for the debian distro, which is essential given the current lack of support from Fedora.