Fedora 15 ARM alpha rootfs

I meant to do this over the FUDCon weekend but completely ran out of time. So I’ve cut a minimal rootfs tarfile for both softfp and hardfp Fedora 15. They are little tested but I am running something very close to them and others have had success.

The hardfp image comes with kernels for OMAP (BeagleBoard/PandaBoard) and Tegra devices (primarily Trimslice) where as the softfp image comes with OMAP and Marvell (plug computers). The root password is fedoraarm and there’s various instructions for devices all over the place.

You can get the hardfp rootfs here and the softfp rootfs here.

This will likely be the only rootfs for Fedora 15. The GUI bits are coming along slowly but from here on pretty much everything that’s working will be installable using yum.

I’m not concentrating most of my time on getting ARM rawhide on the coat tails of mainline. More on that very soon 😉

FUDCon Blacksburg Day 2 & 3

Well day two of FUDCon started with the usual bits and pieces that people have reported about including BarCamp pitches and the FPL’s state of the union address.

Again most of my day revolved around ARM bits and pieces including the Secondary Arches session. We gave away vouchers for 20 Raspberry Pi’s for people to hack on when they are released. I’m looking forward to those 20 people getting involved in the ARM project and blogging about all the cool things they do with them.

In between all the ARM sessions and lots of random hallway discussions about ARM, OLPCs and just about anything Fedora I managed to sneak off and sit in on a Gluster session to have a break from ARM related stuff. In between all of that I was hacking on rawhide for ARM but that’s another blog post entirely so stay tuned.

FUDPub was a good opportunity to have a break from the laptop and discuss various things and catch up with various people I hadn’t managed to spend much time with and get to know them a little better. I was somewhat surprised that the beer ran out so quickly.

Sunday morning was a slower kick off and was some serious ARM hacking and some further discussions. Things started to slow down as people departed to head home. Mid after noon was the second board meeting. We discussed a number of things from SOPA/PIPA support options through to Christoph’s Fedora Council proposal. In ended up being quite a long but fairly productive meeting.

Overall as always I found FUDCon very useful, this time in particular it was good to get some high bandwidth discussions over ARM related stuff with people that I’ve been speaking with daily on IRC and telephone over the last couple of months. It was also good to get it some more attention in the wider Fedora community to give people opportunity to hear about the things that we’re doing, the things we’re aiming to do and to ask questions about things like aim to promote ARM to a primary architecture.

FUDCon Blacksburg Day 1

So day one was very busy. Most of the day was spent discussing and planning various components of the ARM secondary architecture. We ran a number of sessions from koji infrastructure planning and development, building rawhide on ARM, defining requirements to promote ARM to a primary architecture. There was a LOT of information to digest and a lot of discussion had. It was all very productive.

From 16:00 we had a Fedora Board meeting to discuss board goals and Fedora goals and the success and/or failure of the current goals. We also discussed board communications with the rest of the community and projects for the board for the comming year.

Other than that even the hallway discussions were fairly high bandwidth as well and it was a very busy. I very much enjoyed sitting down for a few beers in the evening to discuss some of the many things I do within Fedora and other side projects and hobbies.

FUDCon Blacksburg Transit Day and can someone bring a spare Dell laptop charger to FUDCon

The flight was some what uneventful….. Immigration was WORSE than usual. It took 2 hours because for some reason they wouldn’t open more than four positoins at once, the queues were out the door. The there was the usual dicks that are the TSA with their terrible attitude that turns even worse if you decide to opt out of their useless scanners that will scan through everything and still require you to strip everything off.

I then discovered I’ve left my laptop charge behind in the early morning rush to get out of the house 🙁 So if anyone has a spare Dell Latitude E-Series or D-Series laptop charger they could throw in their bag I would be for ever grateful (my laptop is a E6410 but I’ve used all E and D series with it).

Repeat: Anyone coming to FUDCon that has a spare Dell charger I can borrow over FUDCon I will owe you beer (or what ever your fave beverage is!).

OLPC XO-3 and Fedora

For a lot of you its not been much of a secret that I’ve been working on various OLPC things for quite a number of years now in my own time. Its also not a shock to a lot of people that I’ve been spending a lot of my Fedora time on ARM related things in recent months! After all in both cases it’s been not unusal for me to bother you about dependency or build issues whether it be by email, bugzilla, or even in person 🙂

Most Fedora people would have seen the announcement of the XO-3 Tablet by One Laptop Per Child and Marvell Semiconductor. You’ve likely seen it in the media, its been reported all over the place. You might have even seen some of the cool press shots like this one..

XO-3 Tablet

or this one…

XO-3 Tablet

One of the things that you may not have realised is that the devices being demoed at CES were running Fedora 14 on ARM. Pretty cool huh? Sure it’s by no means currently as fast as it could be. Firstly it’s running “softfp” which doesn’t properly make use of the hardware floating point. It also doesn’t even begin to make use of Marvell’s equivilent of SSE/MMX let alone some of the other features. We’re aiming to make it scream, comparetively for a device that draws 2 watts! It will never be a super computer but it will be able to run an OS that is pretty close to the linked beast, and even be a little more rugged and portable to boot!

If you don’t believe me check some of the following photos (courtesy of Gizmodo) . Do any of them look familiar?

Yes, that’s Sugar

And GNOME 2.32, I’m working on GNOME 3… help wanted!

a close up.

Say CHEESE! Well say Record on Sugar actually.

More details can be found in Gizmodo’s OLPC XO 3.0 Hands On: The $100 Wonder Tablet article.

I think it’s very cool to have Fedora running on a device that is again so ground breaking in both cost and design right from the very beginning! No Android here, it’ll come later. I’ll have its big brother at FUDCon Blacksburg and I look forward to getting it running Fedora 17 very soon 🙂

Preparing for FUDCon Blacksburg

Well its almost time for FUDCon Blacksburg. In fact this time next week I will have already been in Blacksburg for over a day. I’m really looking forward to the event but I know it’s going to be very busy. So what have I got planned for my time in Blacksburg? The list in fact is pretty small:

  • Fedora Board Business: We have a open board meeting planned. There will no doubt be a numbner of things to discuss and there’s already a number of things on the list.
  • Fedora ARM and Secondary Architectures in general. There’s a lot of things to discuss with ARM from koji infrastructure, building rawhide, things we need to do to progress ARM to a Primary Architecture and a lot of other things from technical to procedural and process oriented. There will also be ARM based OLPC XO 1.75s and if the rumours are true possibly even a pre production Raspberry Pi

That looks like a small list but it would be very easy to fill an entire week with those two topics on their own. If I get a spare session here and there I would also like to spend some time attending some of the Cloud SIG sessions as there’s going to be some great stuff happening there too!

My Fedora 2011 in review

Its been a some what mixed year for me personally and I certainly won’t be massively disappointed to see the end of 2011. In Fedora land the year has been completely full on!

The first major event that kicked off 2011 for me in Fedora was FUDCon Tempe which as always was brilliant. Its always awesome to catch up with a lot of Fedora Friends and to drive forward various bits of the project that are sometimes easier done face to face, whether it be in a session or at FUDPub over a beer or two! It was at Tempe that our fearless leader threw down his first challenge of the year to me… to blog about what I’m doing in the land of Fedora on a weekly basis. I didn’t quite meet this goal but have still averaged a post every fortnight.

From April a massive amount of my time was taken up with helping the Fedora ARM in particular getting Fedora 14 built for the XO 1.75 but also massively fixing packages upstream to build on ARM. With the F-14 release for the XO out I’ve been concentrating on F-15+ and later for both hard and soft floating point. The ARM project still continues to consume massive amounts of time and has basically covers a lot of the things I wanted to achieve as part of the Fedora Mobility SIG.

May saw me head off to the excellent Red Hat Summit for the second time. I was there for work and as always its very useful for the type of work I do for my $dayjob. I helped out on the Fedora booth and as always spent quite a bit of time with a number of Fedora contributors. It was there that our fearless leader convinced me that standing for The Fedora Board was also a good idea.

Fedora 15 was next up on the list, of course. A great release with gnome-3 and all sorts of other goodies. Not so good for Sugar on a Stick which had massively broken networking 🙁

October saw me attending FUDCon Milan which was a rather shorter than some FUDCons but great as always.

Fedora 16 was much more successful for Sugar on a Stick and we shipped probably the best release ever. In fact I think Fedora 16 was an awesome release.

I’m looking forward to 2012 greatly, both in the land of Fedora and in my personal life. I’m looking forward to seeing ARM progress onwards and upwards and hopefully make it to a primary architecture in the coming year. I’m not one for resolutions, I think ongoing reviews are much better so I look forward to working with all my Fedora friends throughout the coming year.

Fedora on a BeagleBoard

My BeagleBoard XM was the first ARM device I bought for running Fedora on ARM. I had it running for ages just fine but then I attempted to do something and ended up with a corrupted filesystem on the microSD card and it was gone. So I attempted to recover it and then re-install but I had no luck with a newer kernel and the dreaded u-boot. I had no luck and gave up and every now and again gave it a shot but achieved nothing more than some cussing and a loss of time. Last night I attacked it again with a F-14 rootfs and a 2.6.40.3 kernel and I had success!

So what did I do? The BeagleBoard likes to boot the kernel off a dos partitions so I partitioned the SD card into three: a 200Mb partition 1, a 1gb partition for swap with the remaining going to root.

mkfs.vfat -n bootfs /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 -L rootfs /dev/sdb2

Mounted the roofs and then the dos partition under /boot, extracted the rootfs so the kernel was installed onto the dos partition:

mkdir /mnt/rootfs
mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/rootfs
mkdir /mnt/rootfs/boot
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/rootfs/boot
cd /mnt/rootfs
tar xf /path/to/rootfs.tgz
cd boot
vi fedora_boot_cmd

Add the following:

setenv bootargs 'console=ttyO2,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext3 rootwait selinux=0'
mmc init; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uImage-2.6.40.3-0.fc14.armv7l.omap ; fatload mmc 0:1 0x81600000 uInitrd-2.6.40.3-0.fc14.armv7l.omap; bootm 0x80000000 0x81600000

Then run the following command:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n "Beagleboard-xM boot script" -d fedora_boot_cmd boot.scr

From there you should be able to put the microSD card into you BeagleBoard and boot away. You can get one of the current rootfs tar files from the Fedora ARM wiki page. The current images are a little incomplete but I plan on publishing a new F-14 image soon and before long we should start to have newer images available.

gnome 3.2

Well gnome 3.2 is a nice evolution from 3.0 but to me it feels somewhat disappointing, it actually feels for the most part like a 3.0.2 release for the core UX with some nice added applications and a few applications that do feel like its a .1 bump rather than 0.1.

Some of the good include the new gnome-contacts app is brilliant! In fact the whole “Online Accounts” is a great idea, even if it only currently supports Google and is still a little rough around the edges. Also the ability to finally make VoIP calls directly from the contacts apps is fabulous. Evolution has evolved as it does just about every release, the mapi support continues to improve and the calendaring is back to being usable. The calendar still doesn’t have multi timezone and weather support added back in like was promised for 3.2, this is probably one of two main promises I was looking forward to 🙁

The hotplug notification is good but it needs a noticeable way to get rid of it, often I plug something in and don’t want to do anything with it, or will deal with it on the command line. On the topic of notifications… why does everything seem to change again for what used the notification area? I gnotes no longer appears down the bottom like it did previously? The other thing that has regressed again is that the “lock screen” support. WHY?!? How hard is it to get something so simple correct?

The other thing I was looking forward to returning, and it has, is Network Sharing support. Its not something I use a lot but with inbuilt 3G its something very useful when I’m travelling, and that is useful 🙂 although there’s still a number of regressions in the NetworkManager stack that move between plain annoying to why? The wireless for my Enterprise WPA AP in the office finally remembers the password when I change it, but it still pops up and prompts for the password, I click OK with the password that’s in there and it joins.

The themeing hasn’t improved, if anything its regressed. The title bar isn’t a smooth blend and there’s still not a great distinction between active and non active windows. Also the gtk2 theme still hasn’t been bought up to the same design to the rest of it so you still have the blue scroll bars. That said the dark theme’s for totem and Image Viewer is great!

Overall its certainly an improvement, but in most cases they’re small but I do wish they would pay more attention to regressions and polish.

Verne in beta…

I have a number of devices that run Fedora and they all get upgraded at various times through out the release process. The eeePC 901 gets upgraded, reinstalled and uses the upcoming release regularly and constantly. My build test VM runs the release from shortly after beta of the previous release. My “stable” devices upgrade times vary depending on the release. These are devices I need to live my life and include my work laptop, my NAS box, my media centre box, my firewall, and two servers. So what releases are they all running 🙂

Work laptop: this was upgraded this week to Verne. It didn’t get upgraded to F-15 for a couple of months after the release. Most of the time it gets upgraded around the beta. I have some issues with it, most are thankfully not major road blocks. I’ll cover this one in a separate post.

NAS: Running F-16. Its solely CIFS/NFSv4 and some other services like Squeeze Centre Server. No major problems as yet.

Build VM: Its a VMWare VM. Has been fine, but for some reason of late its suspending or locking up of late. This is somewhat concerning.

Media Centre: I need to upgrade it, i’ve just not had the time. I’m looking forward to trying out Media Explorer once I’ve finished the package review 🙂

Firewall: Sometime very soon. I wish NetworkManager would add support for native IPv6 on PPPoE connections

Servers: My primary hosted server is still running Fedora 14. It runs a number of websites, mail servers and VMs. I want to upgrade this but it needs a proper backup process first 😐 My other server is running F-15 and I’ll likely push it to F-16 once I’ve worked out why the buildbox VM is suspending/crashing, it is after all my primary mail server.

Overall I’m looking forward to Verne. Its looking to be a very solid release with some great new features and the stabilisation of two of the major changes in F-15 in systemd and gnome-3 with a lot of thanks going to Adam Williamson and the QA team and their tireless work to keep the rest of us in check and on schedule. I believe Adam barely slept in the four days leading up to Verne beta being declared good to go so we didn’t slip another week. Thank you all! I’m looking forward to a great release 🙂