Saturday 10 March 2012

Raspberry Pi - three distributions and media centre

Fedora 14 Raspberry Pi Remix now available. Debian 6.0.4 available and Arch Linux port also available. OpenELEC media player distribution has also  been ported to RaspberryPi - first port to ARM - but not yet tested on final production hardware, though working on the alpha boards.

Arch, Debian and Fedora torrenting - and proving very popular. It should be interesting to see how well the Raspberry Pi works in education - in the interim while the first batches go to developers, there will be a huge amount of use. What will be interesting is that this will mean LOTS of Linux hardware in people's hands at affordable prices.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Just curious how many non-free packages might be shipped in that Debian image?

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  2. As far as I can tell, there are no non-free packages in the Debian image at all from Debian. The Debian image for Raspberry Pi was supplied by the team at University of Cambridge who have been using Debian for testing and their work.

    The Raspberry Pi forums suggest that the non-free video drivers for the GPU are in /opt/vc.under the Debian image. I have been using the kernel referenced in http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/02/18/raspberry-pi-releases-1st-sd-card-image-debian-how-to-use-it-in-the-emulator/ with QEMU.

    The Fedora remix includes the non-free drivers which Debian puts in /opt in the main filesystem. The inclusion of the non-free drivers and components is the reason that Fedora for the Raspberry Pi is a remix rather than included entirely within the main Fedora distribution.

    Instructions to run Fedora on QEMU have also been prepared at http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/03/08/instructions-to-run-raspberry-pi-fedora-14-remix-in-qemu/ . Thanks CNX software :)

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