Thursday, July 18, 2013

Pidora and Python

Hands On: Raspbian alternative on Raspberry Pi Part Deux

Last month, I looked at FreeBSD and Arch Linux and demoed these in a hands on session. This month, one of the Pi I'll have for the hands on this coming monday at WFU will be running Pidora.

If you are used to Raspbian for your Python coding, you'll find that there are a few differences, such as using yum instead of apt-get. Development packages end in -devel instead of -dev. All of that is quite normal since pidora is really Fedora and Raspbian is debian.

What I've found though is that if you are not willing to build quite a few packages yourself, it is still a little early to adopt pidora. I've not been able to get a satisfactory (ie, full library support) version of pygame going (no package available in the pidora repository at this time). No mpeg, no framebuffer support etc.

On the plus side, it boots very quickly (faster than arch or raspbian) and the shutdown is also extremely fast. I suspect that within a few months, the repository will be a bit more complete and will make python development easier. I'll revisit the OS later this year.

François
@f_dion

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