I had intended to persevere with the Fedora 14 ‘respin’, despite it being (correctly, IMHO..) described as ‘a bit buggy’..     Performance was improved with the newer 3.1.9+ kernel image, without the debug messages, but overall the response was still very sluggish..    I selected XFCE as the UI, as I had used this – successfully – with Fedora 17 (pre-release..) on my other arm-based system – the Dreamplug..

As I had now re-cycled a Class 4 8GB sd card (from an old camera!) I had enough ‘disk’ space to try the three available distro images – Fedora, Debian, and also Arch Linux (which I had never used before..)

After the somewhat fascinating experience of booting a relatively unknown distro, (I have been using Red Hat – and later Fedora – since 1997..) I immediately found that Arch Linux was noticeably better in response to commands, and in performance with XFCE.    I should emphasise that this is _not_ an exhaustive scientific test, but merely observation of responsiveness!    It is also a valuable learning experience, and I am becoming familiar with the intricacies of pacman (the Arch Linux package manager…)..      It would appear that Arch Linux is generally more ‘lean and mean’ than Debian or Fedora..

Next, I may try out the fourth image now available – and one that I must confess I had never heard of until recently – QtonPi, and I shall – of course – eagerly await the release of the upcoming Fedora 17 image…