Spotlight Feature: Get Mobile with Fedora 14

The release of Fedora 14 is just around the corner, and one of the areas of active development for this release is mobile devices, such as netbooks. Fedora community members have integrated several different mobile development platforms for use with Fedora, including Sugar on a Stick and software from the MeeGo project. Fedora members also work to bring Fedora to new hardware platforms.

“Fedora Mobility is a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in Fedora on small devices,” said Peter Robinson, leader of the Fedora Mobility team. “Our initial aim is to ensure that the hardware used in devices such as Netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) work out of the box with Fedora.”

Peter Robinson also helped integrate the Moblin 2.1 interface with Fedora 13 as well. Moving forward, the Fedora Mobility team plans on replacing the Moblin interface with software from the MeeGoTM Netbook UX stack, and possibly supporting the KDE Plasma NetBook interface in future versions of Fedora as well. For more information on the Fedora Mobility work, check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mobility.

In Fedora 13, Sebastian Dziallas helped integrate the Sugar Learning Platform into a Fedora spin, called “Sugar on a Stick”. Originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child Project and designed specifically as a 1-to-1 computing environment for K-8 students to collaborate with others in exploring the world around them, Sugar is used every day by more than 1.5 million students in classrooms throughout the world. Sugar on a Stick makes it easier to load the Sugar software onto a USB drive and boot it on a personal computer.

In addition to Fedora Mobility, the Fedora community is also working on porting existing software packages in Fedora to work on ARM processors, such as those found in many mobile devices. With an ever-expanding variety of new ARM-powered devices making their way onto the market, the Fedora ARM team opens up a whole new area in which Fedora can shine. The rapid pace of Fedora development also gives ARM developers a large assortment of software and development tools for innovation on this architecture. “The Fedora ARM community continues to make great strides in this area. It’s a very exciting time to be a part of the Fedora development community,” said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader. “Part of the Fedora vision is that people don’t just run free software, but that they have control of their digital devices and data. Fedora Mobility and Fedora ARM help further these aims.” For more information on Fedora’s efforts on the ARM architecture, check out https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM.

MeeGo is a trademark of The Linux Foundation.