Fedora project

[Mike Barnes]

Arkadiy Chapkis - Arc wrote:
> It's been mentioned a few times that there are some people working on
> porting Fedora to alpha. I wonder what would be the way to start
> playing with it and possibly help in testing it on my Miata. The
> official fedora project site doesn't have any information about alpha
> port.

Myself and a gentleman called Christian Balint (not sure if he's 
actually on this list) have been putting something together for a while. 
We were doing this independently until about a week ago, until I 
discovered one of his posts while trying to track down a glibc build 
issue, and got in touch. He was much further along than I was.

Wasn't really about to shout out about it just yet, but since the 
topic's been brought up ...

Cristian's FTP site is at:
ftp://ftp.rdsor.ro/pub/Linux/Distributions/AlphaLinux/

My in-development install tree is at:
ftp://ftp.maths.monash.edu.au/pub/install/fedora/2/alpha/

My tree (can also be accessed with rsync) is updated from my home build 
environment, and is set up as a Yum repository. It LOOKS like it might 
be installable, but believe me that it's not. I'm currently messing with 
Anaconda and boot images at home. A lot of what's there is from 
Cristian's builds, and is periodically brought up to date if he adds in 
something I haven't got.

SRPMS are only included if we've needed to modify them from the stock 
Core 2 versions. If they're not there, it was a clean rebuild. The SRPM 
situation will be resolved as soon as time and bandwidth allow. For the 
moment, see Cristian's FTP site or your nearest Fedora Core 2 mirror.

Mostly, I've just patched around a couple of dependencies on ALSA until 
we get a stable 2.6 kernel going, and I took the liberty of giving the 
system a new codename. :)

The toolchain is fairly stable. Cristian has been doing an incredible 
job tracking down build issues. He's got a new glibc coming up soon, but 
the one that's there does the job mostly. We're even optimistic about 
being able to produce an ev6 build of glibc fairly soon.

There are still some issues with the 2.6 kernel packages, but they're 
not far off, I believe. I'm still working under 2.4 most of the time. 
Cristian can provide more information on this, anyway. I'm mainly 
messing about with Anaconda right now, and chasing down and building 
dependencies for various packages. My tree currently has about 750 
packages. That's just under half of the full Core 2, I think.

There are NO instructions on upgrading from a 7.2 system right now. An 
awful lot of stuff needs to be done simultaneously really - but it is 
possible with a bit of persistence and a rescue boot CD nearby. Hell - 
_I_ managed it. :)

If anyone wants to help mess around with this, you're more than welcome. 
  Neither Cristian or myself intend to become distribution maintainers - 
this is a hobby for both of us, but we're hoping once the hard bit is 
done, there'll be enough momentum to keep it going by itself.