Fedora 37 on Raspberry Pi4

Two of my favourite things coincided today – Fedora Linux & Raspberry Pi!

I first started “messing around” with Linux back in 200x – early Red Hat 6.0~6.2 on x86 laptops. How painful that was. But the Red Hat thing stuck – Fedora has been my daily driver for many many years now, although whilst distro-hopping I’ve dallied with Ubuntu (and Suse, Gentoo, Crunchbang and Arch!) and obviously spent a lot of time with another Debian flavour thanks to the Raspberry Pi OS, previously known as Raspbian.

I got hold of a Raspberry Pi as soon as I could after it was launched in 2012 and have used many in personal and work-related projects over the 10 years since.

Imagine my delight when it was announced that Fedora 37 would officially support the Raspberry Pi4. Sure there had been all sorts of un-official ports over the years and some semi-official Fedora support for models up to 3B+ but I was keen to try the “official” spin and get Fedora running on a Pi4 8GB.

To install the image to an SD card I used the arm-image-installer prog from another Fedora machine after downloading the raw disk image Fedora-Workstation-37-1.7.aarch64.raw.xz and following the guide here.

WiFi (in fact all networking), Bluetooth and audio all work straight-out-of-the-box 🙂

A few 64bit ARM apps are missing – No google-chrome (yay for Firefox!) on aarch64 and no spotify-client (yet, and of course the web client doesn’t support playing “protected content” in FireFox or the Fedora version of chromium – why is there still no widevine support in ARM64 ???) 😞 Seems like multiarch support for aarch64 Fedora isn’t there yet either so even more 😞 😞 😞



At least there’s ncspot 😉

ncurses + Rust based spotify client goodness….

rpmfusion is your friend for all sorts of goodies like vlc

I did also manage to get telegraf running on Fedora ARM64:

From https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/releases I chose the CENTOS aarch64 package and followed the instructions at https://leo3418.github.io/2020/07/27/compile-vcgencmd-on-fedora.html to get GPU temp logging working via the vcgencmd method.


I also found some useful info on getting the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO working in Fedora here.

Overall Fedora 37 on the 8GB Pi4 feels snappy and fairly well polished, although some tiny things are still not quite there – the “About” pane from the Gnome settings page is missing Processor and Disk Capacity info ??? (neofetch is missing CPU type too, curiously it’s missing when running neofetch on Raspberry Pi OS aarch64, or even just a 64bit kernel on 32bit OS. 32-bit kernels report the “BCM2835” Broadcom part number 🤔 )

Gnome settings – About – missing Processor info and Disk Capacity ???
neofetch system info
Comparing kernels: Fedora 37/aarch64 vs. Raspberry Pi OS/aarch64
RPi4 + Fedora 37 via cockpit

Later, even more favouriteness – Fedora/Raspberry Pi AND Psion Series 3a backups:

…backing up like it’s 1995 😀

Backing up Psion Series3a 2M – drives A: M: and B: 👍🏻
Psion 3Link serial cable connected to Prolific pl2303 USB/RS232 adapter
DOSBox Staging running PSION’s MCLINK.EXE
Fedora 37/Linux (kernel 6.0.11-300.fc37.aarch64) running on Raspberry Pi 4 8GB

Psion Series 3a backup
running both MCLINK and the Psion SIBO C SDK compiler in 2 separate dosbox sessions 🙂

Published by zedstarr

Chilled out human being, doing techy stuff.

One thought on “Fedora 37 on Raspberry Pi4

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