Fedora ARM on the Google Chromebook

I’ve been asked numerous times about Fedora ARM’s plans to support the Samsung Chromebook so I thought I would do a quick blog post to outline our plans. In short “ABSOLUTELY” and “As soon as possible” are the answers 🙂

So of course we plan to support it. As a device the Samsung device is what we’ve all been waiting for in an ARM device in that it’s cheap, nice looking, has relatively decent specs and is all nicely packaged.

Unfortunately initially we’re going to need to support it as a Fedora Remix as there’s some bits that haven’t landed upstream that will require us to fork things and in particular the kernel. So in the short term we’ll do a remix and hope to have a usable version of that out soon and a more stable one not too far behind the Fedora 18 mainline release.

So what is there to be done I hear you ask? That’s a difficult answer but it breaks down roughly as follows:

  • uBoot / DevMode and how best to support it (and if we’ll be able to remove the horrible 30 second boot message)
  • Kernel support, both initially a fork and then as mainline.
  • Xorg / GPU support. We have the basics of this already in Fedora 18 but we want it to go as fast as possible 😀
  • Sound. Be aware that at the moment you’re likely to fry your speakers if you try to use it now. We don’t want that. It means we’re going to need to deal with UCM and associated support bits. It’s something I’ve only just found out about and I’m researching what we’re missing. It will be useful for all ARM platforms (and x86 too).
  • Improved HW support – basically make sure everything works as expected whether it be HDMI or WiFi.

That’s basically it (and it’s no small amount of work) but most of the rest of Fedora ARM hardfp should run just fine and dandy on it so all of that hard work is done. There’ll likely be some optimisations that can be made so it runs even faster but we should soon be able to support another stunning little device with Fedora ARM 🙂

Watch this space

5 thoughts on “Fedora ARM on the Google Chromebook”

  1. You can count me in for testing any Fedora 18 ARM stuff on the ChromeBook. Currently have it booting a hacked up F17 image on an external SD card. Looking forward to the more sanely integrated solution

  2. Hello I have no problem booting Fedora 17 on Samsung Chromebook from SD disk but I could not login. I tried root with “fedoraarm” password and also tried as guest – in both cases I was not let in. Somebody experienced the same problem? I disabled SELinux by setting SELINUX=disabled in /etc/selinux/config but still could not log in.

  3. Just diggin it! Fedora and ARM my perfect match. Currently running fc17
    fixed up with some CROS binaries and conf file. Works like a charm, consider its pretty much out of the box. Still a little rough around the edges but is works. Worthwhile to check out the respository (rpmfusion is available too.): Easiest way to install gcc, LXDE and more. You can even install KDE or Gnome if you like (not recommended though).

    For Dimitar: I started with the HFP XFCE image (found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM). And following Olaf Johannson’s instructions. To complete the FC17 setup, you need to little more prep work:

    mount the SD card (with fc17 image) with proper permissions under Chrome OS crosh/shell:
    mount -o remount,suid,exec /media/removable/External\ Drive\ 2/

    then chroot’it and setup root password
    chroot /media/removable/External\ Drive\ 2/

    setup guest account. (no passwd required!)
    mkdir /home/guest
    rsync -a /etc/skel/ /home/guest
    chown -R guest:users /home/guest
    usermod -d /home/guest -g users guest

    to finish up do
    exit
    umount /media/removable/External\ Drive\ 2/

    Now reboot and CTRL-U to fedora

  4. I read somewhere (can’t find it now, nor the commit) that there is now some protection against this in the chromeos kernel.

    1. Yes, there’s been a patch applied to the driver to work around the issue. It will ship with the next release of ChromeOS and any images we do for Fedora.

Comments are closed.