Today a Fedora 13 ARM Beta was released. This makes it obviously time for me to blog about my Fedora adventures from last weekend on my loaned BeagleBoard. I managed to get kernel 2.6.38-rc3 compiled on a virtualized Qemu ARM system. Compiling the kernel really takes some time. A stripped down version, without compiling loadable modules took just over 880 minutes. An other test with make omap2plus_defconfig uImage took around 1400 minutes.
It seems to be advised to build your own kernel for an ARM board. I have no idea yet if some kind of default kernel would (suboptimal) work, so I built a more fine-tuned kernel for the beagleboard. Luckily there was a default configuration for a beagleboard (make beagleboard_defconfig), sadly that default is not available in current kernels anymore. taking an old config and updating it a little, got me a recent kernel (2.
Last week I spent some time making libvirt able to start emulated (through QEMU) ARM systems. Today I was looking into starting Fedora on a BeagleBoard. A colleague of mine loaned me the BeagleBoard, for me a nice opportunity to check out the current status of Fedora ARM. There is some documentation on the Fedora ARM Wiki pages. Unfortunately the available downloads do not include a kernel that runs on the BeagleBoard.
Some blogs, archives for mailing lists, other site and even some application seem to be able to find a matching icon/avatar for the user that posts a message. Blogger, WordPress.com, but also for example Gmane use Gravatar (Gravatar is one of the avatar-services used by Gmane, not the only one.). Personally I always like to know how the others I am working with look like. This makes is also easier in case one actually meets one other.
A minor annoyance on with wireless networking at home seems to easily resolved. I'm very happy that NetworkManager offers a CLI that works together with the GNOME-NetworkManager-applet. cnetworkmanager does, or at least did not work for me. The WiFi at home uses a hidden ESSID and it looks like NetworkManager does not connect to this automatically. Well, that's not completely correct, it just takes a lot of time for NetworkManager to attempt to connect.
Being ill a couple of days and have the need to do something (more or less) productive, I thought of giving Fedora-ARM a go. As I use libvirt and virt-manager for work, running an ARM-emulation this way is my preferred setup. The Fedora Wiki provides with a nice HowTo a good start. Unfortunately there is already a mentioning that qemu-system-arm gets wrong arguments and a script that functions as a (temporary) workaround should be used.
I always need to check what driver and RPM is needed to get my the best out of my printer and have it enabled to scan over the network. This are some notes mainly for myself, but maybe they are helpful for someone else too. Configure the printer and enable it: # lpadmin -p sheldon-court -L "Sheldon Court" -E \ -v ipp://172.31.24.253:631/ipp \ -P /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/PPD/Brother/BR7225_2_GPL.ppd.gz Install and configure the scanner add-on:
This is a short explanation on how to create a bootable USB-stick with GRUB. This stick can be used to boot an installer, rescue-mode or an on-stick installed Linux distribution. I mainly use my USB-stick to install different versions (and architectures) of RHEL. Booting from this USB-stick and starting and starting a kickstart installation is really convenient. Detect the USB-stickThis is a very important step and the one where most attention is needed.
This looks really cool! It includes logging the traffic, and even a graphical analyser is available: Virtual USB Analyzer - Tutorial
To enable access to a (virtual) system over a serial console I'm doing following steps: 1) add a login-prompt on the serial console echo 'S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 115200 vt100' >> /etc/inittab 2) allow root to login over serial console echo ttyS0 >> /etc/securetty 3) let /sbin/init reload the inittab to make the login prompt active /sbin/telinit q Now you can connect to the serial console and after pressing 'return' you should see a login prompt.