Fedora 17 on ARM released, but not on RPi

there is mention now of an official Fedora 17 RPi Remix to be available

shortly and to be announced separately.

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

Interesting, I wasn't aware of Raspbian.  I'm learning a lot reading all those comments from that 2nd link.

Drew,

  It's a bit of a shame you haven't been following the Raspbian story.

As asb says, what they've done is stunning.  I'd even go so far as to say

that the future of RPi depends to a great extent on Raspbian, since

hard float makes quite a large difference in reducing sluggishness

to an acceptable level, and neither Fedora nor Debian seem to have any

plans to build with hard float enabled.

  So if I could make a suggestion, I'd suggest you try to convince the

element14 management to do whatever possible to build a relationship

with the Raspbian guys, with the intent of ensuring their continued progress,

and convincing their wives that what they are doing is worthwhile.

Maybe ask them what it would take to become a platinum Raspbian sponsor.

They could probably use web hosting space, and perhaps some equipment

for their build farm, etc.  I'd suggest adding Raspbian to the element14 download

page, or at least adding a "coming soon" note to the page, and making it

clear that they are element14's preferred RPi OS.  Maybe element14 could

sell SD cards with Raspbian pre-installed, and send them a royalty.  Maybe

their story could be featured on the element14 site.

p.s.

  my only other suggestion is to avoid the crispy mountain oysters at the

Far Western. 

Providing authoritative information seems to be an foreign concept for RPF, they're running the whole show like it were a food blog.  If it weren't for third parties with eLinux.org, the whole thing would be an information disaster.

I think I'll pickup another SD card and try out one of the unofficial Raspbian builds.  Do you know what types of applications would benefit from floating point performance?

I'll contact the appropriate folks in the organization to let them know about this project if they've not already seen it.

Thanks,

Drew

Drew,

   I think the killer app is Midori, although I'm sure various other apps,

including games would also benefit.  The main reason Midori benefits is the

javascript engine.  Javascript represents all numbers using double precision

floating point, even integers.   I think the sunspider javascript benchmark

runs about twice as fast using raspbian vs. debian, although I haven't looked

at whether some components of the benchmark benefit disproportionately.

I wouldn't expect quake3 to benefit, since I believe it uses integers.

  Besides speed, raspbian also apparently has significantly more packages

available compared to either fedora or debian soft float, and I think also

more usb drivers.

  And perhaps the most important feature is that raspbian has momentum.

Rasbian is making fantastic progress, and that is attracting lots of volunteer

contributors.  So I expect bugs to get fixed a lot faster in raspbian than the other

distros, and I expect the kernel to get updated sooner, and drivers added faster.

btw, Raspbian is currently looking for mirrors, particularly outside Europe.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=8104

Ah, I didn't realize that about Javascript.  Midori is definitely the most painful experience of apps I've tried on the Pi so far.  I've actually been using the lynx from the shell often when I need to look something up.  That's good to know hard float may bring a better web experience.  Also, I need to check out NetSurf which I saw you mention.

Thanks for pointing about the thread about the mirrors.  I'll bring it up internally.

I got a chance to  try out Raspbian last weekend.  I didn't notice an improvement with Midori, but NetSurf from their repository is fulfilling my need for a responsive browser (albeit with no JS).   I also like there is an Arduino package. 

My favorite part of Raspbian is the Pisces+MATE image which provides a desktop that is like Gnome.  It's very natural for me since I've been using Gnome for so long.  Memory was ok with NetSurf, Arduino and terminal all running.

Thanks!

Drew

Drew,

  Very nice review! 

  With regard to Midori, I'm not clear if you tried it but didn't notice

any difference, or didn't try it at all.  It would be disappointing if

there's no noticable difference, and it might indicate that something

was misconfigured somehow.

If you have time, it would be interesting to run some browser benchmarks,

either the sunspider javascript benchmark, or just using a stopwatch

while loading particular pages.