Unity Linux, Korora, Fedora and 32Bit.

I haven’t updated anyone on the status of anything for a while. For various reasons. Since the last few Linux oriented posts I have had a child and been busy with work, teaching and the projects I have been working on. So since this January I will recap a bit.

Korora
For a brief time last year I worked on Korora after it’s maintainers quit. After a period of development and allowing an upgrade path to Fedora 30 I was pretty much thanked asked to let it die by it’s maintainers. Of course out of respect to them and such a great project I obliged and sadly halted any further work.

Unity-Linux
The renewed work I did though with Fedora 29 and 30 which Korora used as a base, allowed me to turn my attention to Unity-Linux. I had rebased Unity on Mageia, but had ran across multiple technical and community issues with that decision. For a time I had tried to become involved in upstream RPM maintenance and though a program is provided, I seemed to never be able to progress in it and due to various login issues with their wiki and my account finally gave up with a poor viewpoint of their community interaction and outreach. It’s my opinion (which may not matter much) that Mageia could be a much more thriving community (not that it’s dying or anything) with maybe a more relaxed or better managed apprentice program. It seems like it’s a “job” that a majority of the senior packagers don’t seem to value the investment in. Though I would not consider myself necessarily a pro at packaging for Mageia I have packaged quite a few RPMs and that also didn’t seem to be taken into account. In anycase the work on Korora I didn’t want to go to waste and with the feeling of not really being able to contribute to upstream at Mageia I thought it would be more advantageous to adopt a more mature base for Unity Linux. So Fedora was it. This went fine for a while, despite some strange Anaconda issues some had, I was able to get builds up and running and use my in-house program GoLiveCD (a GoLang version of mklivecd) to work and create an install-able distribution. Things quieted down a bit as I had installed 29 and then 30 on a few machines, including my main laptop and rarely had a need to change much. At times however, I still worked on Unity specific features like a Welcome App, but it wasn’t a priority. Unity Linux  met my needs on my 64Bit UEFI machines and my 32Bit BIOS based machines, so I was content.

Fedora
One reason I had chosen to rebase on Mageia, after building Unity Linux from scratch based on a MUSL-libc tool chain, was because they supported 32Bit. Fedora had dropped 32bit as a supported Arch. While working with Korora I realized though Fedora had dropped it as a supported arch 32bit binary rpms where still available and I could create a rootfs and even an image using the same kickstart file for 32bit as I was doing with 64bit. So when it came time to move from Mageia to Fedora I wasn’t so worried. Unity Linux version 29 and 30 both had 32bit releases. Why is 32bit such a big deal to me? I come from what now would be the old school mentality of Linux users. Those of us who started using Linux not just on budget hardware but old hardware because it ran well. So I still have a lot of (neat) old hardware like EeePCs and various other 32bit netbooks. They still work and they are running Unity Linux. My kids use them to surf the internet and do online education sites, they serve a fairly good purpose still and could continue to. That leads me to Fedora 31. When it came time to update I quickly realized ALL support for 32bit was gone. Thinking of maybe going back to Mageia, I realized they also had dropped 32Bit support. I was left some pretty tough options.

RPM Based Distros
I have packaged debs and rpms. I prefer RPMs and the Red Hat ecosystem in general. I also do not prefer to manage thousands of packages on my own. Though there are ways I can automate this task and have in the past, there’s still a lot of time and overhead when you are the only one doing it. There are actually very few RPM based distributions available to base on. So if you don’t want to go it alone with packaging everything, then you’re left with few options.

Options
So for Unity Linux I have very few options if I want to continue and hardly any options if I want to have 32Bit as well. I want to continue, but I am also tired of not offering something more public and community oriented. So I am at an impasse.

1. I could give up and in the near future through away my kids 32bit devices as they become less and less secure, though they’d still work hardware wise fine.

2. I could fork Fedora 30, and continue 64bit and 32bit development, but have a lot of work to do.

3. I could find another RPM based distro somewhere in the nether reaches of the universe that has both 32bit and 64bit and try to ensure their survival.. as they’d be a rare gem at this point.

I think I know what I am going to do.. and the next few days will determine that decision. If you have suggestions let me know. Thanks