I'll be giving a general talk about Secondary architectures in Fedora (this includes Fedora on ARM) on Openmobility 2011 conference in Brno, Czech Republic, where the first part will rather an overview how Fedora is built, what are the problems, etc. The second part will be more practical and here I will be presenting for example the Efika Smartbook and Smarttop running Fedora 13.

With the beta release of Fedora 13 for the ARM architecture it was time again to try Fedora on my Efika MX Smarttop from Genesi. I have started with the latest Efika kernel from git, Fedora 13 root filesystem tarball and a faulty SD card, which I didn't know :-). So the beginning wasn't that successful - CRC errors when loading the kernel by U-Boot, random crashes during runtime, etc. And I started to think some hardware isn't working right. But using "rpm -V" and visually inspecting some text files made it clear that the SD card is faulty. After switching to a fresh card everything started to work perfectly.

The U-Boot bootloader in the Efika has a nice feature built in. It supports booting user supplied OS image when a simple rule is followed = put the kernel image on first partition (use uImage as filename) and the root filesystem on the second partition. Now press the power button and voila, Fedora 13 XFCE desktop is there (click for full-size image) :-)



Some details about the setup:

• kernel is 2.6.31.12.3-ER1-efikamx from my archive, a newer one should work too, but I've spent too much time with latest kernel and faulty SD card ...
  
• F13 beta root filesystem with the XFCE packages installed manually, the repository doesn't include information about package groups (like the "XFCE desktop" or "GNOME desktop" groups), so they were installed individually. To be precise the top-level packages were installed and the rest was brought in as dependencies. Full package list is here
  

PS: I think I will buy the Smartbook from Genesi Europe very soon, there is even an option to get a replacement keyboard with Czech layout.

PS1: Fedora ARM is now running also on my Smartbook and some dependency issues were resolved in the Beta2 of F-13 since my first attempt so the installation process is much user-friendly now

PS2: This blog was originally posted March 3th as here

Yesterday I received a package that contained a new ARM-based hardware - an Efika MX Developer Edition as a part of the developer program run by PowerDeveloper.org. My project is to run Fedora/ARM on it and after obtaining HDMI-DVI cable and EU power cord I could first start it up. The work has begun :-)

Reference manual for the Freescale i.MX515 SoC

kernel patches for the i.MX51 SoC platform on the way to upstream