Fedora 17 available for ARM and PPC

Three weeks after Fedora 17 arrived, the developers at the Fedora Project have released an ARM version of their Linux distribution. Fedora 17 ARM is available as prebuilt images for various platforms including the Trimslice, Beagleboard xM, Pandaboard, Kirkwood Plugs, Highbank and iMX-based systems. An image is also provided for the Versatile Express platform which can be emulated by QEMU.

A basic image that includes a Fedora 17 root filesystem without any kernels or X packages and one with a full Xfce package installed are provided for users who want to add their own custom kernel for another ARM platform; these images are available as two variants, one for the Arm to Armv5tel ARM architectures and another for Armhfp to Armv7hl. So far, no prebuilt images of Fedora 17 have been released for the Raspberry Pi, although Fedora was initially announced as the mini computer's recommended distribution.

The project released Fedora 17 for Power and PowerPC processors on Thursday last week. Like the ARM builds of Fedora, the version for PPC processors within Fedora is considered a "Secondary Architecture" to prevent potential architecture problems from delaying the development of the Fedora versions for x86-32 and x86-64 systems, which are the project's "Primary Architectures". The ARM and PPC versions contain most, but not all of the software that's included in the x86 variants.

(crve)