Chinese Fedora Community and Fedora-MIPS Port

Currently I'm getting ready to move to Beijing (北京), China (中国) in June. While I am still looking for employment I have also been busy with assisting the Chinese Fedora Community (FZUG/中文用户组). As part of some our activities I will give presentations about Fedora and the community at the BeijingLUG. It is a growing community... but we are still looking for new users, ambassadors and contributors. We would also really like to work together with other other user groups in the APAC. If you are Chinese, in China or interested, drop by in our IRC channel #fedora-zh on freenode or get in touch with me (吉拉德, gbraad), Caius Chance (kaio) or Yuan Yijun (袁乙钧, bbbush). We are looking forward to seeing you!

Part of building the Fedora brand, some friends of the Chinese community and I started to port Fedora to the MIPS architecture. MIPS is an architecture that gained a lot of attention recently with the release of the Loongson processor. This processor is Chinese made and ended up in several netbooks and mini-pc's. While they were only available on the Chinese market, they are now being sold in America and Europe, e.g. by the Freedom Included initiative.

Currently we have chosen to target the Loongson 2F, but in time we will also support other MIPS-compatible processors. The primary goal of this project is to provide support for MIPS as a secondary architecture in Fedora. Just like the ARM port, our secondary goal is to enable derivative distributions based on the Fedora package collection and repository that are more suitably optimized for embedded and mobile use-cases. For this we want to work together with the Mini SIG as we can both benefit from this.

We now have a test build available of Fedora 12 (as n32 mipsel) which should be able to run on Qemu or MIPS-based hardware, like the Fuloong. While we are in the process of fixing some remaining build and technical issues and submitting the patches, you are invited to help us test this release. The Fuloong is currently the platform we build and test on ourselves. Be warned, expect to do some DIY especially since no documentation is available yet... and your mileage may vary.

The team currently consists of me (project-lead), FaiWong (technical lead, lazyfai) and XinZhen (co-lead, lonestar). If you want to contribute or donate hardware, please get in touch with us. More information can be found on the Fedora-MIPS wiki page, or just drop by in our IRC channel #fedora-mips on freenode.