Fedora on the Pinebook Pro

First thing to note here is that this is not limited to the Pinebook Pro, I’m just using it as the example for 64 bit Rockchip devices with SPI flash on Fedora. This post is focused on devices with SPI but I’ll do a separate follow-up post for other devices including details for writing to eMMC over USB.

The story of Fedora on the Pinebook Pro, and other Rockchip devices, has been a sordid story of a lack of time, bugs, rabbit holes, more bugs and various other things. Not at all sordid at all really, mostly just a lack of time on my behalf, and nobody else stepping up to assist in a way to benefit all Fedora users, mostly they do one time hacks to sort themselves. Overall the support in Fedora for Rockchip devices has been quite solid for a number of releases. The problem has been with the early boot firmware, notable because without SPI flash it wants to splat itself across the first 8Mb of the disk, and if there was SPI flash it generally wasn’t overly stable/straight forward.

Anyway we’re now in a place where devices with SPI flash should mostly work just fine, those devices without it will work with a little manual intervention, and while the support isn’t complete, and will need more polish, they’re all details we can polish with little interruption to users by standard package updates. By default users will have accelerated graphics and from my testing on GNOME 40 it’s by all accounts a pretty decent experience!

Setting up the firmware

First step is to get the firmware written to SPI flash. This is a two step process, the first is to write out a micro SD card from another device, the second is to boot that mSD card on the Pinebook Pro, or another device like the Rockpro64, and write the firmware to the SPI flash.

There’s some nuances to this process, and the way the early boot firmware works, if another version of U-Boot takes precedence that is likely OK as it should still be able to work, the fall back is to use the internal switch to turn off the eMMC temporarily. I also have no idea if the Pine64 shipped U-Boot has any display output, the Fedora build does, if not you’ll need to use the option to disable eMMC or use a serial console cable. Anyway on to the steps:

Set up the mSD card
Use a mSD card that has no data you wish to keep, this process will wipe it out. You want at least U-Boot build 2021.04-3.fc34, you can adjust the umount to be more specific, and you need to substitute XXX for the media, otherwise it’s a relatively quick and straightforward process:

sudo dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing -y arm-image-installer uboot-images-armv8
sudo umount /run/media//*
sudo spi-flashing-disk --target=pinebook-pro-rk3399 --media=/dev/XXX

Write the firmware to flash
Now remove the mSD card from your host and put it into the Pinebook Pro. Press the power button, from experience you likely need to press and momentarily hold and in a second or two the display will light up with text output. Interrupt the boot by pressing space. Next up we write out the flash:

Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
=> ls mmc 1:1
   167509   idbloader.img
   335872   idbloader.spi
   975872   u-boot.itb
  9331712   u-boot-rockchip.bin

4 file(s), 0 dir(s)

=> sf probe
SF: Detected gd25q128 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 16 MiB

=> load mmc 1:1 ${fdt_addr_r} idbloader.spi
335872 bytes read in 39 ms (8.2 MiB/s)

=> sf update ${fdt_addr_r} 0 ${filesize}
device 0 offset 0x0, size 0x52000
61440 bytes written, 274432 bytes skipped in 0.803s, speed 427777 B/s

=> load mmc 1:1 ${fdt_addr_r} u-boot.itb
975872 bytes read in 107 ms (8.7 MiB/s)

=> sf update ${fdt_addr_r} 60000 ${filesize}
device 0 offset 0x60000, size 0xee400
914432 bytes written, 61440 bytes skipped in 9.415s, speed 106127 B/s

Once the last command above has completed eject the mSD card and type reset at the => prompt and the device should reboot and you should see output similar to before but running from the SPI flash!

If you had to turn off the eMMC you can now turn it back on.

Installing Fedora

The nice thing with the firmware on SPI flash it should now work mostly like any other laptop and you can use either the pre canned desktop images (Workstation, KDE, XFCE, Sugar), the Workstation LiveCD iso or the standard everything network installer.

To run the arm Workstation image off a micro SD card or USB stick you can do the following:

arm-image-installer --media=/dev/XXX --resizefs --target=none --image=Fedora-Workstation-34-1.2.aarch64.raw.xz

Note ATM you’ll need to use the USB port on the right hand side, I need to investigate the USB/USB-C port on the left as it appears not to currently work in firmware, but works fine once Fedora is running.

Next steps and improvements

The two biggest issues remaining for the Pinebook Pro is enabling PCIe support (supported from June 2021) and the lack of the brcmfmac firmware, both WiFi and bluetooth, being upstream. For the later issue if there’s anyone from Synaptics that can assist in resolving that problem please reach out to me! A interim WiFi firmware to use is here.

Some things at the Fedora level I’ve not really tested and will do so more, and likely polish with OS updates, in the coming weeks include sound, USB-C port (charging and display output). On the firmware level there’s still some more improvements to be done, tweaks to improve the USB support, turning on the power LED as early as possible to give an indicator, improvements to the EFI framebuffer to ensure consistent early boot output, support for UEFI BGRT to enable smooth boot etc.

For support please email the Fedora Arm mailing list or reach out on IRC via #fedora-arm on Libera.Chat.

Installing Fedora on the NVIDIA Jetson nano

Updated – Aug 2021
You now used the latest R32.6.1 release and it now works with the latest Python releases. Some minor edits below.

Overview
Nvidia launched the Jetson Nano Developer Kit in March 2019, since there there’s been a few minor refreshes including a just announced cheaper 2Gb model. I received the original 4Gb rev A device shortly after they were launched.

Over the last year or so as part of my role at Red Hat I started working with some of the NVidia Tegra team to improve support for the Jetson devices. This work has been wide ranging and though it’s taken awhile, with Fedora 33 we’re starting to see the fruits of that collaboration. The first is improved support for the Jetson Nano. The official L4T (Linux 4 Tegra) Jetson Nano images look a lot like an Android phone with numerous partitions across the mSD card. This makes it harder to support a generic Linux distribution like Fedora as there are assumptions by distributions of control they can have over the storage, so while it was certainly possible to get Fedora to run on these devices it generally wasn’t for the faint of heart. As of the recent L4T releases, you definitely want R32.4.4, it’s now a supported option to flash all the firmware to the onboard SPI flash enabling the use of the entire mSD card for the OS of your choice, which as we all know will be Fedora 😉 but the instructions here should be adaptable to work for any distribution.

Before we begin
We do it in two stages, first is to flash the new firmware to the SPI over the micro USB port, second we’ll prepare the Fedora OS for the mSD card. For the first stage you’ll need the latest L4T Release R32.6.1 and the Fedora U-Boot builds installed locally.

Before we get started you’ll need the following:

  • A USB-A to micro USB cable for flashing
  • A HDMI monitor and a USB keyboard
  • A jumper, a jumper wire or something to close the connection on the FRC pins for recovery mode
  • A 3.3v USB Serial TTY (optional)
  • An appropriate 5v barrel PSU (optional)

If you wish to use a serial TTY there’s a good guide here for connecting it to the RevA nano, the RevB has two camera connectors so they’ve moved the serial console headers to near the mSD card slot. The command to see serial output is:

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Flashing the Jetson Nano
So let’s get started with flashing the firmware. This step with the firmware on the SPI doesn’t have to be done often. First we’ll extract the L4T release and get all the bits installed that we need to flash the firmware:

sudo dnf install -y usbutils uboot-images-armv8 arm-image-installer
tar xvf ~/Downloads/Jetson-210_Linux_R32.6.1_aarch64.tbz2
cd Linux_for_Tegra
cp /usr/share/uboot/p3450-0000/u-boot.bin bootloader/t210ref/p3450-0000/

Next, based on instructions from the NVidia Jetson Nano Quick Start Guide, we need to put the Jetson Nano into Force Recovery Mode (FRC) to prepare for flashing the firmware:

  1. Ensure that your Jetson Nano Developer Kit is powered off. There’s no need for a mSD card ATM, we’re just writing to the SPI flash.
  2. Connect the Micro-USB OTG cable to the Micro USB port on the Nano. Don’t plug it into the host computer just yet.
  3. Enable Force Recovery mode by placing a jumper across the FRC pins of the Button Header on the carrier board.
    a. For carrier board revision A02, these are pins 3 and 4 of Button Header (J40) which is located near the camera header.
    b. For carrier board revision B01, these are pins 9 and 10 of Button Header (J50), which is located on the edge of the carrier board under the Jetson module.
  4. Only if you wish to use a separate PSU place a jumper across J48 to enable use of a DC power adapter.
  5. Connect a DC power adapter to J25. The developer kit powers on automatically and enters Force Recovery mode. Note it may be possible to do this with USB power but I’ve not tested it.
  6. Remove the jumper from the FRC pins of the Button Header.
  7. See if you can see the Jetson Nano is in recovery mode by running:
    lsusb | grep -i nvidia

Now we can actually flash the firmware (make sure you’re still in the Linux_for_Tegra directory):

sudo ./flash.sh p3448-0000-max-spi external

You will see a lot of output as the command runs, and if you have a serial TTY you’ll see some output there but eventually you’ll be returned to the command prompt and the system will reset. If you have a HDMI monitor attached you’ll see the NVidia logo pop up, if you have a serial console you’ll see a bunch of output and eventually the output of U-Boot and the associated U-Boot prompt.

Jetson TX1 and TX2
You can basically follow the same instructions above for the older TX1/TX2 devices except for two things. For the TX1 you can use the same L4T release, for the TX2 you need to download a different L4T release.

For the U-Boot copy there’s a different U-Boot for each device which needs to be copied to a different location. For the firmware copy I treat the eMMC as if it was the SPI flash, and run the OS off a SD card, it’s not the most efficient but it keeps things more straight forward:

TX1:

cp /usr/share/uboot/p2371-2180/u-boot* bootloader/t210ref/p2371-2180/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx1 mmcblk0p1

TX2:

cp /usr/share/uboot/p2771-0000-500/* bootloader/t186ref/p2771-0000/500/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-tx2 mmcblk0p1

Getting Fedora running
Now we have the firmware flashed we can prepare Fedora for the mSD card. Download the Fedora Workstation for aarch64 raw image. You can of course also use XFCE, Minimal or Server images. Put the mSD card in reader and after unmounting any filesystem run the following command (look at the help for other options around users/ssh-keys):

sudo arm-image-installer --media=/dev/XXX --resizefs --target=none --image=~/Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-33-1.3.aarch64.raw.xz

Note you need to replace XXX with the right device, and you don’t need a target option as we’re not writing the firmware to the mSD card.

Once that completes you should be able to pop the mSD card into your Jetson Nano and reset the device and see it boot. You will see all the output if you have a serial console attached. If you’re using HDMI it may take a little while once the NVidia logo disappears for the GNOME first user setup to appear.

Also note that while a lot of things work on this device, like the nouveau driver for display, it’s not perfect yet and we’re actively working to fix and improve the support for the Jetson Nano, most of these will come via the standard Fedora update mechanism. If you have queries please engage in the usual ways via the mailing list or #fedora-arm on Libera.Chat.

Fedora package spring cleaning

So it’s meteorological spring, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’m preparing to move house for the first time in almost a decade so of course it’s time to procrastinate and have a spring clean of the packages I maintain!

A number of these I’ve maintained longer than I’ve been in my current flat and like a lot of the contents of my flat I’m not sure why I still have them! A bunch of them I packaged when MeeGo was the coolest thing to run on your Netbook and before GNOME-3 was stable and packaged and I wanted to run MeeGo on Fedora on my ASUS EeePC 901! Then a bunch I’ve acquired over the years because various things I was interested in depended on them. There’s others I actually have no idea why I own them! Anyway, with my day job doing “Device Edge” or “IoT” and with less spare non work time (why yes, apparently I do have a life outside of Fedora, who knew!) I decided it’s high time I relinquished the maintainership of these packages and let someone else love them or allow them to sail off into the sunset of their, probably long overdue, retirement!

So without further ado the list of packages I relinquishing is as follows…. Please reply to the list message or message me on IRC/email (if you know the Fedora packaging process) to (co)maintain something in this list:

* GNOME related:
clutter
clutter-gtk
clutter-gst
cogl
libchamplain
rest

* A UPnP stack, used (or at least used to be) by GNOME and others:
gssdp
gupnp
gupnp-av
gupnp-tools
gupnp-dlna
gupnp-igd
rygel

* Ancient gnome related (please retire or move the deps to copr already):
gamin
libglade2
libgnomecanvas
gnome-themes
ORBit2

* GTK VoIP client. Mostly dead upstream. Has explicit deps/tightly coupled with opal/ptlib:
ekiga
opal
ptlib

* iOS/iMobiledevice - Apple iDevice support:
ifuse
libplist
libusbmuxd
libimobiledevice
usbmuxd

* Random / no idea TBH:
libfakekey (kde-connect-libs)
icon-slicer
telepathy-mission-control
loudmouth

A list of packages that I still have an interest in but would appreciate a co-maintainer:
dotconf
festival-freebsoft-utils
speech-dispatcher
flite
csound

Raspberry Pi improvements in Fedora 29

So Fedora 29 is probably going to account for the largest single improvement to support on the Raspberry Pi support in Fedora since we added initial support in Fedora 25. It certainly wasn’t without issue, but after quite a bit of debug we’ve got the post release issues with the WiFi back to being stable!

WiFi improvements
The support for upstream NVRAM files and the ability to add those files to linux-firmware means we get WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Series of devices out of the box! No need to grab anything, it just works! Well mostly, we had some issues with WiFi being very intermittent, as well as a missed bug around aarch64 but now with the 4.19.10 kernel everything appears to be working and stable. This makes me very happy and it took longer than I had hoped but we’re there. This device specific NVRAM driver support will also help another bunch of cheap Arm and x86 based devices that ship with Broadcom/Cyprus based WiFi support moving forward.

ZRAM enabled by default
By supporting and enabling ZRAM swap by default we get a more responsive device and less wear on the MicroSD storage. Over all we’ve seen reasonable performance improvements and to no date no major issues.

GNOME performance improvements
In May 2018 the Raspberry Pi Foundation kindly hosted a GNOME Performance Hackfest in the lovely Cambridge. Over a couple of days we managed to fix a number of issues seen, review and document a number of issues and work on a number of ways of reducing the memory usage of GNOME. Of course this improvement is primarily seen constrained devices like the Raspberry Pi but ultimately less memory utilisation by GNOME even helps devices with decent amounts of RAM and CPUs too. The fixes didn’t arrive in time for Fedora 28, but a bunch have landed in Fedora 29 providing noticeable improvements, and the GNOME team is by no means done and there will be more coming in Fedora 30 and beyond! It was an excellent start and I expect there will be ongoing enhancements here into the future especially with devices like the Purism Phone which will have similar constraints.

Initial CPU frequency support
Another of the largest issues around the Raspberry Pi is complaints it was slow, part of the issue here is that there’s no upstream CPU Frequency driver which means all models of the Raspberry Pi run at a glacial, but safe, 600Mhz out of the box compared to the highest speed, which on the 3B+ is 1400Mhz. With Fedora 29 we’ve landed an experimental cpufreq driver which allows us to run the Raspberry Pi 3-Series at much closer to optimal speeds. While this is experimental it might not stay around if we find out it causes issues or ends up being a maintenance burden but to date it hasn’t yet appeared to have caused any issues.

HWmon Voltage Sensor
There’s a new driver that reports when the voltage supplied by the PSU drops below the required voltage. It can be a bit noisy in dmesg but one of the biggest support problems we have with the Raspberry Pis is people using a power supply that’s not powerful enough, this issue is more of a problem with Fedora 29 because with the support for running at faster frequencies due to the cpufreq driver it means we also draw more power and some PSUs that were previously fine now cause issues because they can’t supply enough current.

Enhanced support for config.txt
A lot of the hardware addons are supported in Raspbian are done by enabling things in the config.txt file, this in turn does things like loading DT overlays and merging them with the base DT to enable extra hardware like HAT support. We have enhanced the way Fedora works with this which enables us to be much closer to the way Raspbian handles these things. The advantage this has is that the documentation that’s written for Raspbian is then usable by Fedora in the wider Raspberry Pi ecosystem which in turn makes it easier for end users to get HW up and running due to less differences in process. There’s further enhancements to make here but every step closer is easier for everyone to enable and use their favourite HATs.

Improved bcm283x firmware support
In preparation for grub2 support we enhanced how we deal with the firmware that the Raspberry Pi uses for booting. This deals with the early startup. We never use to upgrade it by default to ensure things didn’t break, but it also meant most users also didn’t by default get the fixes and enhancements. Now we do. The config.txt is also handled directly which means if you never edit the file you now automatically get any changes we make, because rpm handles the file as a config file, if we change it you get a .rpmnew file so you won’t lose your changes.

Camera support
This wasn’t available in the Fedora 29 4.18 kernels, but with the rebase to the 4.19 kernel the support for the camera on the Raspberry Pi CSI Camera interface improved enough we could enable this in Fedora. The early 4.19 kernels don’t automatically detect and load support if the camera module is attached. There’s some patches in 4.20 in rawhide for this, and we’ll bring some of this to 4.19 soon, and we’re working with upstream to further improve the camera support. You’ll also want the latest bcm283x firmware which tweaks some of the config.txt and updates to a firmware with ISP fixes.

Another improvements
There was also a number of general Arm improvements which sped up crypto on the Raspberry Pi, improved the USB, fixed up some issues with the wired ethernet on the 3B+, power and a number of other fixes. As always there’s more coming. The 4.20 kernel rebase should also bring with it analog sound support early in the new year.

Conclusion
Overall I was pleased with the work that landed in Fedora over 2018 for the Raspberry Pi. The WiFi regression was disappointing, but now with that fixed in 4.19.10 we have WiFi support out of the box without users needing to download anything which moving forward will make things a lot more straight forward. The initial support for the camera makes it much more useful in numerous use cases and we’ll really polish up the HAT support in Fedora 30 which for me is the last remaining big ticket item for Raspberry Pi support. There’s still some annoying bits around the EDID detection in the display, but there’s work to improve that upstream, and also there’s work to land the media decode offloading upstream too which will also one of the few remaining bits.

Getting started with Fedora on the 96boards Dragonboard

Support for this board has been a long time coming, it was originally announced in March 2015 and shipped later that summer. Two years on we can finally add support for it to Fedora. The enablement here will also assist us with supporting the newly announced 600c and 820c boards more quickly. We’re not all the way there yet, there’s still some firmwares that needs to go upstream into linux-firmware, but the improvement is fantastic and it’s been a pleasure working with the 96boards and Qualcomm teams getting to where we are today.

At the moment we support running Fedora off either an micro SD card or a USB stick. We don’t currently support running off the eMMC and currently basically treat that as the location of the firmware. Anyway lets get started!

Updating the firmware

You’ll want to update to the latest firmwares, my board originally had an old firmware without support for PSCI and so it didn’t bring up all four cores or support reboot. OOPS! You’ll need the latest linux rescue images from the 96boards download site. As I write this the latest is the 17.09 release (version 88). Create a directory for this file before you unzip it because it’ll expand all into the current directory. While there we also need a u-boot build that’s prepared for flashing, the upstream support isn’t quite complete, we add a few patches to the Fedora build to get everything working nicely. You can grab a pre-built version here and also get LK firmware build which enables display output.

You’ll need a host with the fastboot utility, in Fedora this is found in the android-tools package, and a micro USB cable. This process is very similar to flashing a phone with a new image, not surprising given the chipset really. If you have a serial console on the board you can follow along on the console but it’s not required for this board.

To put the board into fastboot mode we hold down the volume down button, labeled as ‘(-)’ near the middle USB port and then power it on. Wait around 30 seconds to ensure it’s booted to fastboot. You can test this with the fastboot devices command. You’ll likely want to run the next commands as root, or use sudo, and be in the directory you created with the extracted firmware and u-boot build:

sudo ./flashall
sudo fastboot flash aboot emmc_appsboot.mbn
sudo fastboot flash boot u-boot.img
sudo fastboot oem select-display-panel adv7533_1080p

The flashall command runs a series of fastboot command to write out various early boot firmware to the eMMC, then we write u-boot out to the boot partition, and finally ensure that output is configured to appear on the HDMI port. Assuming you don’t get any errors from fastboot that should be all the firmware done and in place.

Fedora image and further setup

Next up is the Fedora image. I chose the Workstation image, but we also have a Minimal Image and a traditional Server image. GNOME not the fastest in the world as 1Gb of RAM isn’t really enough for GNOME-3 anymore, but it works well enough. On a USB stick or Micro-SD card (I’ve tried both). We need to write out the image, then expand the rootfs (Note: update XXX for the device you’re writing to):

xzcat Fedora-Workstation-27-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz | sudo dd status=progress bs=4M of=/dev/XXX
sudo gparted /dev/XXX (expand the last partition)
partprobe

Next up we need to adjust the kernel command line slightly, mount up the first partition and edit /EFI/fedora/grub.cfg and search for the string cma=256MB and delete it, then add in it’s place the following console=tty1 console=ttyMSM0,115200n8. Next mount the boot partition (partition 2) and create a sym link

ln -s dtb-4.13.9-300.fc27.aarch64 dtb

. Unmount the partitions and we should be good to go on the Dragonboard.

Plug in a keyboard, mouse (and/or a usb cable for the serial console if you’re going that route) and a HDMI cable, plug in the USB stick or SD card and power it up. If you’re following along on the serial console you should see output straight away, screen might take a little longer.

Once you’ve booted you should be able to complete initial-setup (text or the one from Workstation) and login. To get the WiFI and Bluetooth working you need to install a Radio (WiFi and friends) firmware package which I’ve made into a rpm you can grab from here until it lands into linux-firmware.

What next?

The DragonBoard 410c is pretty functional. I’ve not widely tested sound, the Venus media offload components (we have all the firmware and kernel bits for this), the GPS or some of the other more advanced components but I’ll have more details about those soon. I’ll be documenting the above plus other bits on the Fedora ARM wiki so keep an eye on that or get involved and help out 😛

Fedora 23 on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 3

So my corporate laptop for the last three years has been a Thinkpad x220, it’s getting a bit long in the teeth, when I got it the x230 was already out but the corporate standard hadn’t rebased. This time I happened to get a new device just after the new corporate refresh so I have the shiny X1 Carbon gen 3 with real track pad buttons.

Of course I grabbed the latest rawhide nightly boot.iso to install the latest shiny! How did I get on? Initially it was disaster, the kernel crashed before I even got to anaconda (will spend some time to recreate and log that soon). Oops! So I grabbed a couple of the earlier installers and with a bit of trial and error before long I was at the initial anaconda screen. From there the process was relatively boring! Up and running with Fedora Workstation installed, disk encrypted I started to play with it to see which bits were good, bad or ugly.

So first up with the good. Over all the vast majority of the hardware just worked out of the box. The GPU, USB3, wired ethernet, wireless ethernet (iwl 7265 AC), trackpad/thumb pointer, bluetooth mouse, camera, onboard speakers all work just fine, I even managed to enrol my finger in the finger print reader without issue. I must say I’m loving the 1920*1080 screen over the old 1366*768 of the x220 and I’m getting use to the chiclet keyboard layout. Overall F-23/rawhide is solid right out of the gate with pretty much everything working as you’d expect on a stable release. 🙂

It’s not all rosy though and some of the bad is that I’ve not managed to get the firmware upgraded to support 4K displays @ 60hz, thanks to Major and Sandro for the heads up on this, but it never seems to find the usb stick as a bootable image. Not a major issue in the short term as the OneLink Pro Dock I ordered is AWOL but I’ll want it soon as I’ve got a standing desk with a Dell 24 inch 4K monitor. The x220 and 4K monitor had never really worked overly well, the big issue was it only ran at 30hz refresh but I knew that when I got the monitor because I knew I was due for a refresh soon, it also had random glitches. I also need to workout how to adjust the acceleration of the thumb pointer thingy with libinput. Adjusting either the trackpad or mouse options in control panel doesn’t seem to have any effect, I never really used the trackpad on the x220 but I admit I’m getting use to the two finger scrolling for reading long pages. This should all be relatively easy to solve with a bit of poking!

The ugly seems to be the stability of the iwl 7265 wireless driver/firmware. It generally works but regularly shits itself. Some times minor by dropping SSH connections, sometimes majorly resulting in a need to unload/reload the modules or even to reboot! URGH! I’ve heard people complain about recent Intel Wireless stability but the “Advanced-N 6205 [Taylor Peak] (rev 34)” that was in the x220 was always solid. The solid lockups seems to be when pushing a reasonable amount of data via rsync/ssh. I do have a WRT1900AC router and I’ve connected to the 5 ghz 11ac so I’m wondering whether this combo is part of the issues. There is a newer firmware that hasn’t made it upstream yet. I need to do some more playing here testing the 11n 2.4ghz network as well as testing the newer firmware and possibly some patches that are on the wireless mailing list which I’m hoping will actually just land in 4.2 before long 🙂

There’s a few other things I need to play with some more. I’ve not tried external HDMI video/audio, the external display port, the DP to VGA converter (nice one was included in the box though) or the headphone/mic socket. None of the functionality of the dock has been tested yet simply because it’s yet to show up! It reports around 7.5 hours of battery life but I want to look at what the state of power consumption on these devices after mjg59’s post about it to see if I can’t get that well into the double digit hours.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with out of box experience of F-23/rawhide on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 3 🙂

GNOME 3 fall back mode

I’ve been aware of the possibility of gnome fallback mode being dropped for quite some time. I wasn’t aware a decision had been made to definitely do so.

This is somewhat disappointing to me as I know of a lot of users of it. For starters there’s the 2.5 million OLPC XOs that were in the field as of January 2012 (I’m led to believe there’s around 1.5 million more to add from this year) and there’s a lot of ARM devices that have no 3D support because it’s pretty much impossible to use ESGL with gnome-shell at the moment (yes I know there’s plans to refactor mesa and friends to cope with this but that’s not now).

This isn’t designed to be a Federico style rant and if it was it would be aimed as much at the MATE Desktop as the GNOME team. I personally believe MATE would have been better off targeting their resources at properly fixing the GNOME 3 fall back mode to do the things they miss from GNOME 2 as attempting to glue together the GNOME 2 desktop as at least all the core apps are not duplicated and they get to keep the newer code which ultimately will be a lot more maintainable moving forward through the shared development of code. I’m not sure why they went the other route.

Oh well ultimately I believe it will be yet another net loss for GNOME as possibly eventually losing 4+ million odd young users from OLPC deployments (and all the other people such as families that use the devices) when they leave school I think would be a loss for the community moving forward and then add to that the users of it on ARM devices and other old computers in the developing world I think they’re not even aware of the users they have.

N.B. As always the words and thoughts are those of my own and don’t represent anyone else’s opinions.

Using Fedora on your shiny new OLPC XO

So you’ve just received your shiny new OLPC XO 1.75 as part of the awesome Fedora Open Hardware Summer of fun! or you have an existing OLPC XO that you haven’t used for a while and it’s gathering dust. While it’s running Fedora it doesn’t seem to act completely like Fedora and what’s more it’s likely running an ancient Fedora 14 based release and that’s not really cool is it?

Well the first thing to do is to update it to a newer release. There’s XO releases based on both Fedora 17 (stable 12.1.0 release) and devel releases based on Fedora 18 (development 13.1.0 releases). For a XO-1.5 or XO-1.75 the update process is identical. The process I mention here re-images the machine so if there’s anything you need to save back it up first!

It’s relatively straight forward. You basically get the appropriate .zd file, put it on a USB key and away we go. The Fedora 18 based 13.1 images can be found here. You just need the latest .zd (and it’s good practice to grab the .zd.md5 file too) so for 13.1.0 os3 we’d download this file or for F-17 we’d use this one and pop it on a usb key. From there we make sure our XO has battery juice and is plugged into the power. We power it on and instantly hit ESC to get the OFW OK prompt. Plug in the usb key and run the command “fs-update u:\31003o2.zd“. The screen should change to a grid and slowly go all green. Once we’re back at the OK prompt we can type “reboot”. It will take a while to boot the first time as it will update the Open Firmware and do a few other bits but you should eventually be greeted with a Sugar prompt to enter your name. More detailed instructions including for the XO-1 can be found on the OLPC WIKI.

If you wish to move from the Sugar UX to the more familiar GNOME UX you can right click on the little man in the middle, select “My Settings” to get the Control Panel and there’s a icon “Switch to GNOME”. It will ask you to restart X. There’s a matching App in the GNOME menus to switch back.

Next up we want to unblock all updates from the Fedora repositories. The OLPC releases have a specific package NVR set for stability and release just selected updates rather than the usual firehose from Fedora. We generally want all updates available. The one exception to that at the moment is the kernel. So we do the following which removes the OLPC excludes and excludes just the kernel:
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora*
delete this line
include=file:///etc/yum/olpc-exclude
add this line
exclude=kernel

Of course the first thing you want to do now is “yum update” to get the latest and greatest :-D!

Next up is enabling the standard GDM login. This is as simple as yum install gdm and then updating which display manager starts with the following:
rm /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service
ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service
reboot

Finally I suggest joining the Fedora OLPC mailing list. It’s a pretty quiet list but it’s where we copy any release announcements and also a spot to ask XO specific Fedora questions.

So that should get you to something a little more standard and allow you to install some of your favourite bits. Next up of course is getting more involved in both OLPC and ARM things happening in the Fedora community. I look forward to hearing about what works and what doesn’t on the Fedora planet and mailing lists 🙂

Also note that the above isn’t just restricted to the ARM based XO 1.75, even the original XO-1 runs Fedora 17 and 18 well so if you have an old XO lying around now is a good time to dust it off.

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.

gnome-shell one week in

Well its almost a week since I upgraded to Fedora 15 and started using gnome-shell. The good news is I’m still using it and generally really like it, although admittedly there’s quite a few bugs, and quite a few regressions that I really dislike. Fortunately a lot of those are fixed in the short tern with a few extensions and gnome-tweak-tools. I’ve also filed quite a few bugs, updated others where I felt I could add useful information, or just added myself onto the bug for easier tracking. There’s a lot of fixes that are being worked on for gnome 3.2 and I appreciate that the gnome team is working hard to balance their vision and design with a workable desktop.

One thing that grates me a little is the attitude of certain developers though. Comments like “realise that this feature wasn’t a feature in gnome 2 until gnome 2.XX so you’ll just have to wait” isn’t really helpful and 3.0 > 2.XX so it is a regression. You don’t give a toy to a child and then tell them they’ll have to wait to get it back. If they didn’t have it previously they don’t know what they’ve never had.

Dual Screen dock/undock: It works, mostly without issues! This was one of the major concerns I had with gnome 3 as it had caused me problems in testing previously. I’m very glad this just works. Not sure if the issues I had previously were a bug that was fixed or something weird on the live image I used.

Stability: My graphics is an Intel IronLake and the stability is OK. I do have to on occasion swap to a tty and run “killall -HUP gnome-shell” to make it usable again and this mostly seems to be when I’m on a dual screen. I also seem to run into the it leaks a lot of memory bug. When I do a killall it starts off at 80Mb RAM but if its left I’ve seen it get up to 2Gb!

Screen lock, unlock and suspend: This looks like an area that sorely missed out in the development. They hid the shutdown menu option by default but gnome-shell doesn’t suspend when I shut the lid of my laptop. It works fine when I select the option from the menu but that’s no where near as quick especially when I forget and have to reopen the laptop. Looking at Xorg.0.log it detects the “Lid Switch” but seems to ignore it although it configures the sleep and power buttons. Similarly I can’t use Pause to lock the screen and I’ve seen other references to this for other keys. Finally there’s an issue where the screen isn’t always locked on resume from suspend which in my opinion is a security risk.

Alt+Tab and Alt+`: Love it! The later for tabbing between windows of the same app is great!!

pidgin: I fixed my issues with Pidgin by installing the gnome-shell extension. Its not perfect but fixes most of the problems so its usable so for the time being I’ll stick with it rather than migrate to empathy.

Calendaring: It took a surprising amount of time to get use to the clock being in the middle of the screen. What I didn’t get use to is the lack of the date in the display. gnome-tweak-tool to the rescue for that one. I also miss the weather and multiple timezones. The Multiple Time zones should be back for 3.2 although I don’t see any guarantee for Weather information.

One other nice addition to calendaring that the tweak tool added was week numbering down the side of the calendar view. I would like to be able to click on the week number to get that week’s schedule rather than the current week. Its very useful for quick reference when on a call trying to work out which week is best for something.

Notifications: If I’m away from my desk I can sometimes miss notifications unless I explicitly go and hover down the bottom of the primary monitor. This doesn’t run along the bottom of the both screens if you have them in side by side configuration. It also seems that I don’t get notifications from calendar or abrt (that come to mind).

Theme: I generally like the monochrome theme quite a bit but there’s a number of usability issues with it. I find it very hard to tell the active and inactive windows. There’s almost been a couple of embarrassing mistakes there in the style of embarrassing text messages. Also things like the light switch look disabled when they aren’t. I have good eye sight, I can’t begin to imagine how bad this is for people who don’t. Also colour for things like battery/charge indicators (eg the charge thunder bolt is nearly indecipherable from the background), mute etc is a quick visual guide. There use to be colours for batteries at least, I’ve seen that in screenshots on the gnome wiki. There’s a number of things that should be fixed in 3.2 documented in the aptly named Fix Annoying Things on the gnome wiki.

System Settings: There’s weird things that seem to happen here. Firstly I remember some how discovering the “Default Applications” settings, but they’re not in the Systems Settings. No I don’t want to change my default Terminal 😉 somehow my default browser changed from Firefox to Epiphany. I had to go to the Preferences to get it back. Some things seems to be duplicates but different (did I mention this already?) like the places to set languages (User Accounts and Region and Language). There’s no touchpad options in “Mouse and Touchpad” even though its a laptop, again I suspect its getting miss detected. I would have thought there would a “Mail Settings” panel as well.

Mostly I really like gnome 3, it certainly is a dot zero release but is still very usable and quite nice, although not quite perfect. I look forward to the spit and polish 3.2 release.