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What is the difference between Pidora and Fedora ARM? The latter is way more official sounding but it doesn’t mention the Raspberry Pi 2 anywhere on their product page.

Daniel
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2 Answers2

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Pidora's like Raspbian, it should run on either version, but it is not optimized for the 2. Also, you will have to install your own kernel, since the last image is from 2014 (before the 2) and the B+ I use pidora on does not have a kernel7.img in /boot -- but you can get that stuff from the Foundation. I use stock Fedora 21 on the 2.

I've been using pidora for about a year and have had no problems, but the one thing I will say is that it is not updated very frequently; I can't remember the last time I ran yum update and anything happened.1 Fedora 21 ARM is also noticeably behind/lacking in packages vs. Fedora 21 x86, whereas I notice Raspbian tends to be reasonably on par vs. Debian (but of course, there's no proper ARMv7 Raspbian).

I'd recommend Fedora over pidora for the Pi 2. The caveats are mentioned in my answer to the linked question (where there is also an answer about a version that avoids the caveats, but depends on whoever maintains that version, since it is not an official Fedora thing).

1. Hmmm -- just noticed their front page links to the Foundation download page, which no longer mentions pidora :/ They aren't independent volunteers, this was a York University research group project, so perhaps that's defunct and it is no longer being maintained. Works fine right now and is still on par package version wise with Raspbian, I think, due to differences in policy between Fedora and Debian.

Community
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goldilocks
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  • Is there any particular reason why armv6 and lower is not supported ? Just curious. – dhruvvyas90 Oct 21 '15 at 16:10
  • @dastaan It never was. I'd assume that's because ARM was relatively obscure before the explosion of mobile devices which use it; some of those were ARMv6 but everything is 7 or 8 now. Raspbian is based on Debian because Debian did have a v6 port when the pi came out, whereas Fedora/Redhat did not have any ARM port at all until v7 (they focus more on server and desktop platforms, whereas Debian are more broad minded). – goldilocks Oct 21 '15 at 16:14
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As far as I know, official ARM support for any distro is available for ARM v7 and higher. (Don't know any particular reason for this).

Since, Rpi 1 is based on armv6l, you can not go and run official ARM version of any linux distro.

And hence we have debian custom version named Raspbian which is a debian distro but not supported by that distro community.

Similarly, we have pidora which is a custom version of fedora and like wise.

Since, Rpi 2 is based on Armv7, you can now pick offical arm version and run it. Of course, there needs to be some customisation done as to use Rpi's GPU which is the closed core.

Comments / edits are welcomed as I do not know much in details.

Hope it helps.

dhruvvyas90
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