OK, I know I'll probably get flamed here from certain ITT people, I always seems to get that. . . so I'll try to just post the info and then I'll get lost again . . .

I just want to let the developers here, who don't know this already, that an armel version of Fedora 8 is now available for download as a root file system, and that (at least parts, I haven't tried much yet) it works on the Nokia tablets!

Hopefully, for those people who believe that true Open Source is the way to go, this can be a great alternative to Maemo.

The Fedora developers involved in this project are committed to the armel platform (armel in general, NOT necessarily Nokia tablets, if fact so far they have not been discussed much AFAIK) AND hopefully have the resources and developers to carry it forward with all the available distro packages in a way that so far has not been done with other armel distributions .

They need the help of others, however. Open Source is a two way street, and even the folks here have no great desire for an RPM-based tablet distro should consider helping them. This can benefit everyone as packages which work in the Fedora version can easily be ported to Debian.

The developers are asking for any help you desire to do, even just downloading the rootfs, chrooting into it, testing the included packages to make certain they work correctly on Nokia tablets, and then posting your results to the mailing list.

If you are interested in the project you can get more information from the Fedora ARM Project Wiki

For those interested in trying the root file system you can get it here..

wouldn't it make more sense to take the open bits of the maemo platform and work to replace the binary blobs rather than replace the entire os with one that is largely unoptimized for the platform?

Thanks for posting this very welcome news. Sorry no flames from me, but then I am not a certain type of ITT person. At least I seriously hope not otherwise I shall end it all now.
Do you know if this has to be run as an app under the present OS or can it replace the OS entirely? Although I am an active supporter of Penguinbait’s amazing KDE work I do not yet use it because, from what I can see, it becomes an app located in Extras. I appreciate that this is not Penguibait’s fault but is a Nokia restriction.

Basically I want to be shot of this Hildonisation stuff – or Maemo or whatever it is called – and wonder if Fedora has a way of doing that?

I guess I have just demonstrated a great desire for an RPM-based tablet distro?

I am very new to Linux but, if given a bit of How-To guidance, am happy to be of help.

sounds like you're in the market for a laptop? otherwise, you like squinting at windows unoptimized for the small tablet screen?

seriously, hildon is a nice framework and a fairly elegant way to deal with porting of pc based apps. the biggest problem is how hard nokia has made it to customize the environment. imo, the community needs to work on breaking down these barriers rather than replace the whole system.

Yes, I have had experience of this with certain operating systems running on the Zaurus. It just doesn't work well.

Nonetheless, the Zaurus experience was, overall, much more satisfactory and productive than the Nokia one.

Maybe that is the reason.

If the whole system were to be broken then won't that pave the way for the new Fedora o/s and apps to run on the upcoming MID's? Or are we going to be faced with the same obstacles no matter whether with MID's or IT's?

The IT's are just a stepping stone, Nokia happened to get their device out first. Personally I am so unhappy with the way it is being handled that I can't wait for BenQ, Digifriends, etc. to bring their products out. And if Fedora is preparing the way for that then hooray is what I say.

Thank you for no flames This is probably not for you, however, if you do not know much about Linux administration. If you are comfortable enough to use command line stuff then you may wish to read on.

I'm not going to post much more on this here, but feel like I should at least give a few pointers since I started the thread. The thread is primarily meant for developers:

1) The root image is just a basic image with no apps at all, so don't get too excited. You have to install the packages for whatever you want or need, but at least the packages work and are not tgz. All the Fedora packages are available in the repository, but unfortunately right now yum is broken because they haven't yet created a repo database. For now you have to download the packages manually to install them. Hopefully that will get straightened out soon.

2)You don't have to replace Maemo to try it. Your Maemo stuff is safe as long as you use some common sense. You do need a SD card with lots of free space! Read elsewhere on how to partition, format and mount the partition. Once you have a partition you can extract the Fedora root image into it. Then you chroot into the Fedora root image. At that point the Fedora root image is your os and the Fedora apps will work. So far I have found that all of them work, but the problems associated with doing a chroot are readily apparent. Those problems include no /proc filesystem, so certain things, such as DNS resolving, don't work, so you need to type the actual ip. In order to work properly the Fedora root image needs to be bootable from the tablet. Hopefully there are enough people interested in this to make that happen relatively soon.

3) The primary thing that needs to be done, besides getting the repos working, is to find which maemo packages/files need to be in the rootfs to get it to boot on the Nokia tablets. Then RPM packages, or at least a tgz, for those files can be made so the Fedora image can be booted

4) Nobody is working on hildonization, so don't expect the touchscreen to work Please keep in mind that the Fedora ARM version is in no way targeted toward the Nokia platform. I just found out about it by chance. Nobody there is interested in hildon, AFAIK. If you want that to work then I would advise working on porting the hildon framework over to it. So far I'm just using it in Xterm and over SSH. I haven't tried any X apps yet. They are reported to be working, however, so it should be possible to use xkbd with them once the packages are installed.

5)Everything seems to work so far and that gives access to most ALL the Linux packages available from Fedora. It is only a matter of installing the packages.

Best Regards,
gnexus

Update:
A few more notes:
1)You can get /proc working with the following command:
mount /proc /proc -t proc

You can get DNS resolving working by first downloading dhclient-3.0.6-10.fc8.armv5tel.rpm from the following url:
http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/ar...m/os/Packages/

then running the following commands:
mount /proc /proc -t proc

rpm -Uvh dhclient-3.0.6-10.fc8.armv5tel.rpm (you need the package first!)
dhclient

You should now have DNS working!

You won't get any flames from me. I'd already heard about it somewhere else, but it's good to see more people working on Linux for ARMEL. This doesn't just benefit people who want to use Fedora, it benefits anyone who wants to use Linux on ARMEL (even people running the ITOS that Nokia includes with the tablet!). Why is that? The more eyes looking for bugs the better. Fedora, Debian and Nokia will all be able share fixes for problems they run into as they try to get software to compile and run effectively on the ARMEL platform.

As for running Fedora on my tablet...I think I'll pass. Debian already has packages for a good chunk of the Hildon stuff and should be getting more packages as time goes on. Plus, porting a package from one .deb based platform to another should be a lot easier than from a .deb based platform to a .rpm based platform. Good luck to anyone who tries this though.

-John

I think you are right there. No matter, I shall watch closely.

Very nice to see. I personally think we'll see a lot more armel distros and devices in the fairly near future. The chip has low power consumption, with reasonable horsepower, making it well-suited to embedded devices. Sharp (w/ Zaurus) and Nokia have demonstrated that Arm/Linux make a viable platform, and we'll see other entrants as time goes by. The big problems, I suspect, will be the same as between Zaurus & N-series, binary and library incompatibility. There will be several dozen devices, and several dozen builds of gpe-contacts, each specific to one device.

It's really nice to see that fedora's available, hopefully some can figure out touchscreen, how to make it a real rootfs, etc. I realize these are non-trivial, but perhaps possible.

Well, I hate to disappoint, so:
Get lost you N00B! We don't need or want Root Hat!!!!!11!1 You can come crawling back when you're ready to port teh iPhone OSX onto my tablet.

Seriously, I'd rather see slackware. I'm not seeking a RPM based (or .deb based) distro. If I want a hackish OSS OS for the tablet, I really think slackware's a better fit. But in the end, I don't think what packaging system matters that much. Once it's OSS, anyone can repackage and redistrib as they see fit. But there was already Poky Linux (I think) running on these, right? How's Fedora compare to that in hardware support, anyway? Someday, when I have time to kill, I'd like to dual-boot some other OS...