dan wrote: > I was wondering what steps might be involved to port a Fedora release to > another architecture, for the purpose of running on a semi-embedded > platform. Erm: which architecture? Fedora support for PowerPC is, apparently, coming along nicely: http://lwn.net/Articles/114986/ . It's helped by the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs on PowerPC, so there is anaconda (Fedora / RHEL installer) support. Anaconda needs to know a *lot* about how to set up the rest of a platform: things like which IDE / SCSI /other adapters it is likely to see, how to set up a boot loader, how to partition (other platforms may not use MS-DOS partitioning), how to set up graphics hardware, etc. Sparc has the Aurora project, which is rebasing itself to Fedora: http://auroralinux.org/ . ARM, MIPS, SH3, etc. aren't supported by anaconda (and I understand there is a much wider range of sub-architectures and support chips). So you're going to have a problem getting a working system on the system in the first place. If you don't have gcc and kernel support, you're going to need a *lot* of expertise and people. > Are there any tools that are used, or are all packages compiled by hand > for the new architecture? Apparently, Red Hat has its internal "beehive" application which it has not released (but is used for Core). The Extras build system is still in flux. You'll probably find that this is one of the smaller problems you face. > If anyone has ever done anything like this > before on this sort of scale, I would greatly appreciate their input. Depends: if there's already a Fedora-on-whatever project, obviously you'd do better to help them. Can you tell us roughly what the end-result is going to be used for? Is electrical power important? CPU power? Cost? Do you get to specify the hardware? The platform? If you seriously want to start a new port (and have the resources to do so), then you should ask on the fedora-devel list: you will get a lot more pointers there. Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james | The camel has a single hump; @westexe.demon.co.uk | The dromedary two; | Or else the other way around. | I'm never sure. Are you? -- Ogden Nash
