After all the pioneering work done to get a compiled working version of the APC kernel by Mike Thompson from the Raspbian project, as described in a previous post, I now have Fedora Linux running on the APC.

I had planned to be able to get Fedora 17 working, but the APC kernel (vintage 2010!) is just too ‘old’..   Some of the essential functionality required to run Fedora 17 (such as devtmpfs) is present in kernel 2.6.32.9, but unrefined, and marked as [EXPERIMENTAL], and devtmpfs produced a complete kernel crash/dump every time I booted the system..   I tried Fedora 14, which almost worked, but udev produced a massive tombstone every time..

I then tried Fedora 13, and that seems to boot and run just fine, although some major functionality is currently missing, due to the corresponding APC driver source code being unavailable.

Webmin on the APC, with Fedora / ARM 13

Fortunately, this ‘old’ version of Fedora / ARM is still available..   Details at:

http://paulfedora.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/fedora-13-arm-rc1-breathing-new-life-into-eol/

And the YUM repository is still available…

This is actually the Fedora version I first installed on the Dreamplug, over a year ago..    At that time, the Fedora ARM project was considerably behind the version of the ‘mainline’ distribution, but in this case, that has turned out to be a fortunate coincidence, as Fedora 13 matches the ancient kernel currently available for the APC!

Today, the ARM version of Fedora is tracking the ‘X86..’ version, and I am running Fedora 17 on all my other ARM systems, which – of course – have relatively recent kernel versions available (3.2.24 for the Raspberry Pi, and 3.4.9 for the Dreamplug)