Fedora, the community spin-off of Red Hat Linux, has announced the release of Pidora – a special remix of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi, as follows:
Pidora 18 (Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix) Release
We’re excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 – an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set.
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There are some interesting new features we’d like to highlight:
- Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online)
- Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi
- Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi)
- Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards)
- Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage
- C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image
- Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display
- IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light
- For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE
- For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management
- Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI)
Unfortunately for Fedora, Pidora has a rather embarrassing meaning to some: in Russian, “pidora” is a derogatory word for a male homosexual. As a consequence, the following announcement has been posted on the Pidora website:
It has come to our attention that the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian, and this has offended some community members and amused others.
Please accept our apologies for any offence caused. Our goal was to simply associate “Pi” (from Raspberry Pi) and “Fedora” (from the Fedora Project).
We are actively seeking a broadly-acceptable alternative Russian name in consultation with some community members, and will post more information shortly.