Fedora Raspberry Pi remix reborn as Pidora

The Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) at Seneca College in Canada has released Pidora 18, its Fedora remix optimised for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Pidora 18 is a completely new build of Fedora packages for the ARMv6 architecture of the Pi, which has a significant number of packages from the Fedora repositories available for installation. It also features a special headless mode that makes it easy to install the distribution over the network. Pidora is a fresh start following Seneca's earlier Fedora remix for the Pi, which has been discontinued.

The developers say that "almost all" Fedora packages are available in Pidora and can be installed with the yum package manager; Pidora's packages were built from the sources in the official Fedora repository. The Raspberry Pi images were compiled to tailor specifically to the Raspberry Pi's hardware and the included installer includes special configuration modules designed as part of the Pidora project. The default SD card image includes the C, Python and Perl languages and associated programming tools. Libraries that support external hardware for robotics software via the GPIO, I2C and SPI interfaces are also included.

The headless mode means users can install the distribution on a Raspberry Pi without the need for a monitor. To enable it, users will need to mount the SD card with the Pidora image and create a file named headless in the boot filesystem before inserting the SD card into the Pi. Pidora can then be installed and administered over the network. Detailed instructions how to enable and use headless mode are available on CDOT's wiki.

More information on the Pidora 18 release and all of its features are available in the release notes. The distribution can be downloaded from the project's web site and detailed installation instructions are also available.

(fab)