Fedora 25 Beta Linux Distro Now Available For Raspberry Pi (betanews.com)

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Fedora 25 Beta Workstation is now available for both the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3. In addition to the Workstation image, Fedora 25 Beta Server is available too. Owners of ARMv6-powered Pi models, such as the Pi Zero, are out of luck, as the operating system will not be made available for them.
Peter Robinson (from the Fedora release engineering team) writes, "The most asked question I've had for a number of years is around support of the Raspberry Pi. It's also something I've been working towards for a very long time on my own time... The kernel supports all the drivers you'd expect, like various USB WiFi dongles, etc. You can run whichever desktop you like or Docker/Kubernetes/Ceph/Gluster as a group of devices -- albeit it slowly over a single shared USB bus!"

Comments

Unicode? Can you speak it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The most asked question IÃ(TM)ve had for a number of years is around support of the Raspberry Pi. ItÃ(TM)s also something IÃ(TM)ve been working towards for a very long time on my own time... The kernel supports all the drivers youÃ(TM)d expect,

Good to see that the Slashdot web coders are still too incompetent to handle Unicode yet.

Re:Unicode? Can you speak it?

[Hognoxious]

Wouldn't be so bad if the editors bothered to proofread & just replaced them with plain ol' apostrophes.

Re:Unicode? Can you speak it?

[DrXym]

Shouldn't need to replace anything, just not mangle it in the first place. Assume that all text is potentially UTF-8 and life becomes a lot easier. In practice it hardly makes any difference to how code is treated providing you don't truncate text in the middle of a code point or make bad assumptions such as byte length == number of displayable characters. If it's getting mangled it is probably because a script or database is changing the character encoding somewhere along the line.

Re:Unicode? Can you speak it?

[Hognoxious]

It's been a known bug for a long time. They should be aware of it.

Re:Unicode? Can you speak it?

[tlhIngan]

Shouldn't need to replace anything, just not mangle it in the first place. Assume that all text is potentially UTF-8 and life becomes a lot easier. In practice it hardly makes any difference to how code is treated providing you don't truncate text in the middle of a code point or make bad assumptions such as byte length == number of displayable characters. If it's getting mangled it is probably because a script or database is changing the character encoding somewhere along the line.

Slashdot already supports Unicode.

Yes, they do support it. The reason why it doesn't appear to work? They have a whitelist of characters that are allowed.

Why? Because unicode is complex. A character is one or more Unicode codepoints. This consists of a base character itself, plus one or more adornments you can add (accents, emphasis marks, etc). A lot of these adornments can be used to seriously screw up the rendering of the webpage - most common in the past when it was abusing the left-to-right and right-to-left text formatting codepoints. But the modern day one is to abuse the adornment codepoints that can end up making a character thousands of pixels tall and repeating it over and over again to make a mass block of ... black, similar to the pattern you see on the security envelopes. And depending on how your browser is, some of those adornments will invade outside the container and over other people's comments.

And that doesn't even include the ability to overload the browser's text cache and crash browsers.

If you want to see an example, a popular trick in the /. world is toe fake your moderation score using the RTL characters. Google for "5: erocS" to see plenty of examples. Before they implemented an output filter, it would look like "Score: 5" and the real score would look like "1- :erocS".

In fact, abuse of Unicode continues on sites that support it, norminally by piles of trolls.

TL;DR: Unicode is supported, but abuse of it resulted in the site employing a whitelist of allowed characters.

Re:Unicode? Can you speak it?

[Desler]

90% of the world's websites can handle UTF-8 just fine without the silly bugs of Slashcode. It clearly can't be that hard to do it correctly.

who nneds unicode?

[slashdice]

It's 2016. Might as well accept that 7 bits isn't enough for everybody and add utf 8 support.

Re:who nneds unicode?

[wonkey_monkey]

Slashdot is clearly not getting by by just pretending everything is 7 bits, because look at the mess of the summary.

Re:who nneds unicode?

[Hognoxious]

If you need emojis, get an iPhone.

Paper and crayons is more their level.

Re:who nneds unicode?

[Hognoxious]

He's only wrong by understatement. s/decades/millenia/.

There aren't any smilies on Trajan's column or the Rosetta stone.

Is the one for Rasperry Pi 3 64-bit?

[the_humeister]

It's not stated in the summary or article.

Re:Is the one for Rasperry Pi 3 64-bit?

[Desler]

The focus for Fedora 25 with the limited time and resources available, was to provide a polished experience with a single disk image for both the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. At the time the work started it wasn't clear whether the aarch64 kernel support would land upstream in time. The intention is to officially support the Raspberry Pi 3 as an aarch64 device in Fedora 26. There has been significant enabling work in Fedora 25 but there is still quite a bit more work to do to finish the aarch64 support at time of writing.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki...

I love the Pi.

[HalAtWork]

What a great piece of kit. Shows how if you make something useful, documented, inexpensive, widely available, and open (yes to a point) -- build it and they will come. Hobbyists and professionals come together.

Re:I love the Pi.

[adolf]

Pi is cheap. It's not documented well at all (because Broadcom), and it's far less widely available than commodity PCs, tablets, and phones (which I can buy cash-and-carry at Walmart and, sometimes, even Aldi).

Hobbyists like it because it is cheap, and it has the GPIO lines from the SoC built-out on a header.

End-users like it because it is cheap, speaks HDMI, and runs Kodi and Retropie.

But it's not fast. It's definitely built down to a price. And open? No. Not even a little bit, unless you count the fact that "it runs software, as long as you have the right binary blobs" as being "open."

Ob

[Hognoxious]

Does it have shitstemd? I'll probably give it a miss.

Forklift?

[lucm]

Will I need to bring over my forklift to get you out of the basement first?

My first impression was that the implied accusation here is that the other person is extremeley fat, but while I would understand how something like a winch could help, how exactly would you operate a forklift in this situation?

Or maybe I read it wrong, and what you mean is that the other person is part of a subculture of basement dwellers (possibly with redneckish undertones) that can be lured out by the promise of showing them a forklift. I could see myself being enticed to get out of my house if someone was coming over to show me their new Dodge Viper, so I guess other people could be into forklifts, especially if they belong to a blue collar class.

Either way, could you clarify? Based on the thread layout, that forklift comment seems like a tipping point and I feel left out of the conversation because I don't fully understand the implications.

Ubuntu user here

[e70838]

The only thing I expect from a desktop it to get out of my way. Most of my work is using applications like chrome or open-office that are the same on windows or linux. Most of Windows specific programs (like photoshop) work out of the box in wine. My PC is secured with ssh. I can share directories my the PC of my wife (also using ubuntu) using ssh-fs. If I have left a document I am working on at home, I can wake up my pc from internet and access it. If I want to download a youtube video, it is as simple as typing install youtube-dl. With docker, I can install different programming ecosystems in different images. NFS configuration for my NAS disk is straight forward without clicking insane checkboxes like in windows.

I agree that the desktop is nicer in Windows but once you stop trying to do on linux what you used to do in windows, your productivity increases incredibly. Command line is fare more effective than mouse as soon as you have a repetitive task you can automate.

Not exactly new

[Ol Olsoc]

I have been running Ubuntu Mate on both my Desktops and My Pi3 for a good while now. It's nice to have the same desktop and look and feel.

The Pi is used in a digital modem/radio communications system, and replaces a desktop or laptop computer, making the entire radio/computer fit in one small box.

But I see no reason to switch to the Fedora distro at the moment. The only disadvantage of the Pi is it's a little slow during the make process.

Not really new

[yithar7153]

I'm running Void Linux (which is rolling release like Arch) on my Pis, very happily, with runit, which follows the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well :D. Runsvdir, the service manager, is basically a clone of daemontools, where each service has its own supervisor that waits on the child to die, and automatically restarts it if necessarily. It's also one of the fastest booting binary systems. And there's also Alpine (which is heavily focused on security) and Raspbian. I'm not sure what Fedora really brings to the table.