The second Linux distro I looked at for the Raspberry Pi is Pidora, which is the Raspberry Pi version of Red Hat Fidora.
Pidora - Version 20, July 2014 (kernel 3.12.23)
Installing Pidora is even easier than Raspbian. The first thing you are greeted to is a nice GUI wizard that walks you through the process of setting up the keyboard, user account, time zone, etc. Not that this was hard in Raspbian, but Pidora makes this so easy anyone could do it.
Once the initial Pidora setup is complete, you immediately notice how it differs from Raspbian. Whereas Raspbian is an operating system geared towards education and tinkering, Pidora is a full-fledged operating system. It has user login accounts, defaults to a graphical desktop, and the default set of software is geared more towards work and productivity than education.
The next thing you notice is that Pidora is slower and less responsive than Raspbian. This is no doubt because it is a more complete operating system and therefore has more tasks and processes going on. It is still usable as a computer, but be prepared to wait just a little bit more.
Pidora did include built-in support for the Rosewill RNX-N180UBE. To configure it I selected Settings | Network Connections | Add New Connection for WiFi. WiFi was not quite as easy to configure as on Raspbian, but Pidora was fairly straightforward.
Pidora also includes the firmware file for my TV tuner, but I did not run any tests on the hardware such as install tvheadend. After running Pidora I could see that, while a great operating system, it was not a good fit for my needs. So I did not perform any further tests towards the end goal of setting up a DVR.
Pidora was definitely an interesting distro, worth my time to look at. If you are looking to use a Raspberry Pi as a replacement for a desktop or laptop computer then Pidora is definitely worth a look. Of all the distros on the Raspberry Pi, Pidora is probably the closest to a regular desktop version of Linux .
No comments:
Post a Comment