An alpha ARM full of Beefy Miracle (AKA Fedora 17 on ARM alpha 1)

A day later than I had hoped and probably not perfect but I don’t want to keep the hungry masses from their ARM based Beefy Miracle any longer!

So down below is a pair of minimal root fs for ARM hardfp (ARMv7hl) and softfp (ARMv5tel) but first a few notes about known issues:

  • It’s not for the faint of heart! If you don’t like to roll your sleeves up and get dirty, it’s time to back away and go and buy an iPad. While the ARM team is happy to help out with queries we don’t have the time to walk you though step by step. Google is your friend!
  • SELinux is disabled by default. It should work just find but as it’s a tar file the file system would need to be re-labelled. I suggest you enable it but get your device booting first
  • root password is “fedoraarm” (no quotes)
  • There’s some known annoyances with the kernel. It’s not a major problem, just annoying having BUG messages on the console. We’re working to get a fix for the next kernel
  • There’s 4 kernels installed by default the base “versatile” for qemu, and one each for OMAP (3 and 4), tegra and IMX. Remove which ever one you don’t want once you have a working system.
  • It boots to run level 3. We’re working to get GUI interfaces but we’re not quite there yet, see below for more details
  • A lot of ARM devices don’t have battery backed RTCs so you need to ensure you check your time hasn’t regressed to the 70s 😉 as it will cause havoc with yum amongst other things, ntpdate can assist you with that.

So some quick links to get you started on various devices. First there’s the Fedora ARM SIG Page, it’s a little out of date but a good spot to get started. For boards you can get Trim Slice HOWTO, for the various OMAP boards (Beagle* Panda*) here and for the various plug devices here.

Now on the missing GUI interfaces and “your favourite desktop”. We’re working as quick as we can to get all the mainline packages built. I would ask if you please don’t just go and build random packages in koji. We have scripts handling the build process to ensure it’s built identical to Mainline Fedora so everything works as it should but this takes time. The quickest way to get these appearing for use if for you to fix broken packages in mainline Fedora. If they don’t compile there they certainly won’t on ARM. These breakages block the build process of packages higher up the stack as the needed dependencies aren’t there. Again please just don’t go and compile random packages in koji.

That being said there’s been a LOT of work done by a few people to get us to this point so I do hope you jump in and enjoy the ride 😀

Now for what you really are after:

8 thoughts on “An alpha ARM full of Beefy Miracle (AKA Fedora 17 on ARM alpha 1)”

  1. The list of build failures probably needs to be updated, especially to avoid wasting proven packagers time.

    For example, I just saw that epiphany-extensions is on the list, but Mohamed built a newer version a little after the failure:
    http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3655947
    http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=301859

    So this one is fixed, but it still appears in the list of failures. If a proven packager tries and fix the packages he finds on this list, he might waste a lot of time finding packages somebody already fixed.

    Note: I’m not a proven packager myself, so I can’t help anyway.

    1. Oh, and they have to be tagged into f17 release, not testing or f18 or something else

  2. Tried the F17 arm alpha1 rootfs on Pandaboard ES. However using an HDMI to DVI cable does not work. To my knowledge this requires in sysfs /sys/devices/platform/omapdss/display0, there is display1 but no display0.

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