On 1/10/08, John Summerfield debian@herakles.homelinux.org wrote:

Debian is very popular on ARM; I think I read it has more Linux system on ARM than on IA32!.

Yeah, but a lot of them are NSLU2s, and people tend to use large hard drives with their NLSU2s. Of course, they are low-memory machines, so it beats Anaconda every day.

-- Daniel

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 01:27:30PM +0100, Daniel de Kok wrote:

If you need something much smaller (or a non-supported platform like ARM), I'd suggest looking at Busybox or a BSD operating system.

I work on the Fedora ARM port, and we just released a n(unofficial) F8 for ARM:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-arm/2008-January/msg00004.html

Some time ago, I did some work on a CentOS/ARM port, and ended up with most of the core CentOS 5.0 packages built for ARM, but I got pulled onto another project and got kind of distracted from the CentOS/ARM effort -- but I do intend to pick it up again at some point.

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 11:18:07AM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:

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If you need something much smaller (or a non-supported platform like ARM), I'd suggest looking at Busybox or a BSD operating system.

I work on the Fedora ARM port, and we just released a n(unofficial) F8 for ARM:

Fedora is too fast moving a target to really considering worth while implementing device grade </opinion>

I'm sorry, what do you mean? That didn't quite parse on my end. :)

thanks, Lennert

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 11:44:54AM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:

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If you need something much smaller (or a non-supported platform like ARM), I'd suggest looking at Busybox or a BSD operating system.

I work on the Fedora ARM port, and we just released a n(unofficial) F8 for ARM:

Fedora is too fast moving a target to really considering worth while implementing device grade </opinion>

I'm sorry, what do you mean? That didn't quite parse on my end. :)

the shelf life of Fedora, as a release, is too short to consider implementing in a device role. Not sure whats unclear about that ?

I wasn't sure what you meant by 'device grade'.

I made the remark about the Fedora/ARM port and CentOS because of someone noting that ARM was an unsupported CentOS platform.

For one, I don't think the assumption that 'ARM == embedded stuff only' is valid anymore -- as I noted earlier, the horsepower of ARM CPUs has been increasing steadily, and they are starting to pop up in small laptop-like devices and such. I.e. in places where you don't generally need 5yr or 10yr software support cycles.

As to Fedora moving too quickly, we're probably not going to agree on that topic :-), but one argument is that if you're going to keep your software mostly frozen during a 6-12 month device development cycle, it's nice if what you start off with isn't entirely outdated already. I.e. if you base off something that revs quickly, it lets _you_ decide when to freeze, instead of being stuck to some every- two-years release cycle of your upstream Linux vendor. YMMV.

Also, the Fedora/ARM port isn't an end goal as such, but should be seen in the light of what other things it enables (e.g. other mini-distributions based off Fedora, maybe a CentOS port at some point (as Fedora _is_ more or less the upstream for RHEL), etc.)

Finally, for the ARM architecture to become more broadly accepted, IMHO we should ideally be in a situation where everything that runs on Linux/x86 should also run on Linux/ARM -- and that includes the prominent Linux distros.