Fedlet development is currently DORMANT
PLEASE NOTE: At present (October 2016), I do not have any time to work on Fedlet. Through the magic of Google, this looks like a current effort to get Linux (Ubuntu) running on Baytrail / Cherrytrail devices; you might want to try that.
EDIT FEB 2017: I still don’t have time for Fedlet, sorry. However, Nemanja Milosevic is doing stuff, and he links to this page, of another person who is…doing stuff. Hope this helps you.
Fedlet
Can you run Linux on a tablet? Sure you can!
This is Fedlet, a Fedora remix for Intel Bay Trail-based tablet devices with 32-bit firmwares. Particularly the Dell Venue 8 Pro, which is what I have. It has been reported to work on the Lenovo Miix 2 and Asus T100. It may work on the Toshiba Encore and any other 32-bit firmware Bay Trail-based tablet.
It’s based on Fedora 23, more or less – but it has a slightly patched kernel, and a few other tweaks. Some of the Bay Trail support is not yet complete, and testers on various devices have reported instability. So this is not yet stable release quality, but it’s appropriate for playing around with these devices. Seriously, I mean it’s pretty experimental and nothing is guaranteed. This is for playing around and helping to make things better, it’s not a production OS. Please don’t install this if for some reason your Intel tablet is your primary work device or something.
Releases
20150810
Eleventh release of Fedlet.
- Fedlet 20150810 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: 7b2b6a45df4738865481b9af17536f2f011b6c24a3c29fb9d6644dd21da2e545
- Fedora 23 Alpha-ish userland
- Kernel 4.2rc6
- Seems to be a bug where no OSK appears for Firefox; try installing Epiphany
20141209
Tenth release of Fedlet.
- Fedora 20141209 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: c1fcf78e883d28345074bb48c814732a2dced2c79f54ee007c769e31a4fd134b
- Fedora 21(ish) userland – with 0-day updates
- Kernel 3.18.0, with Fedlet patches
20141124
Ninth release of Fedlet.
- Fedlet 20141124 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: c64b859d5ec08dd1c6e15eb8e0553d1b775475e22c852062166a9ae63bfeac6a
- ~Fedora 21 Final TC4 userland
- Kernel 3.18rc6
- NVRAM map for Broadcom brcmfmac43241b4 (thanks “Brainwreck” of the Ubuntu T100 project) which may make wifi work OOTB on Asus T100
- Accelerometer-based rotation support for Venue 8 Pro (i.e. display rotates when you rotate the tablet)
- Backlight level control on Venue 8 Pro when booted with
i915.force_backlight_pmic=1
20141111
Eighth release of Fedlet.
- Fedlet 20141111 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: 3a4078db12b1ed17d9c330ef9c16d2690299212ec6f58867d64f2589a6afc088
- ~Fedora 21 Final TC1 userland
- Kernel 3.18rc4
- Patch from Jan-Michael Brummer to make Venue 8 Pro wifi work
- Has
generic-release-cloudnotgeneric-release-workstation, sorry, I’ll fix it for the next release
20140929
Seventh release of Fedlet, aka the “God, I’m still doing this?” release
- Fedlet 20140929 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: aa2f1150e40965471fc2888db6aad7da52d98f36ce1224b630ba5ed99b28fd5e
- Current Fedora 21 userland, ~F21 Alpha
- Kernel 3.17rc6
- efibootmgr is back, so install might work (not tested)
- Patch from Jan-Michael Brummer for ‘Home’ button on V8P to act as ‘Super’ (start) key
- Patch from Jan-Michael Brummer for mic input (not tested yet)
20140911
Sixth release of Fedlet
- Fedlet 20140911 for all 32-bit Baytrail hardware – SHA256SUM: d76574e38d5afab1cb84ac95dde3945376c76518d2610c8afdaa84305ba3f43e
- Updated to current Fedora 21 userland, ~= Fedora 21 Alpha TC7
- Based on Workstation kickstart
- Updated to 3.16 kernel with small Baytrail patch set, native modesetting should now work, no more hard-coded resolution hacks needed
- Sound driver and firmware included (but you still need to load a correct ALSA config to hear sound)
- Partial support for Venue 8 Pro built-in wireless (firmware included)
- Hardware button support for Venue 8 Pro
- Battery status support
- Install broken (missing efibootmgr)
20140310
Fifth release of Fedlet
- Fedlet 20140310 for 8″, 800×1280 tablets
- Updated base packages and kernel
- Xorg hack to allow windows with integrated title bars to be dragged in GNOME (from Jan-Michael Brummer)
20140226
Fourth release of Fedlet
- Latest Fedora Rawhide base
- Kernel update: based on latest Rawhide, sound (and LPSS) support built in (but not working until you provide fw_sst_0f28.bin* in
/usr/lib/firmware/inteland apply this mixer config), shutdown/reboot should work on Venue 8 Pro, T100 and Miix 2 - GNOME Terminal added to the Dash for convenience
- Updated the patched anaconda to latest Rawhide
- LibreOffice dropped to save space (I doubt anyone wants to use it on a tablet much…)
20140221
Third release of Fedlet
- Fix kernel performance regression
- Touch input rotation seems to work automagically now, so drop it from v8p-rotate (it’s now just a simple xrandr wrapper)
- Add a 10in (T100) build (untested)
20140220
Second release of Fedlet
- Repository configuration added (package: fedlet-repo)
- Useless custom build of xorg-x11-drv-intel dropped
- Kernel up to 3.14rc3 with some patches upstreamed, display hotplug reversion patch dropped and video= parameter adjusted to allow display to work with the hotplug reversion patch dropped
- anaconda bumped to latest version (with fedlet patch applied)
20140207
First release of Fedlet
Working
- Boot
- X
- GNOME
- 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration
- Touchscreen
- CPU frequency scaling (pstates)
- USB (you can use a USB wifi adapter)
- Power monitoring (battery status)
- Sound (with ALSA config file)
- Wifi (on Venue 8 Pro at least, possibly also Asus T100)
- Hardware buttons (on Venue 8 Pro)
- Backlight control (on Venue 8 Pro, when booted with
i915.force_backlight_pmic=1) - Installation and boot of installed system (if you’re very brave)
Partly working
- KMS (hence accelerated video) on Venue 8 Pro seems to have quirks related to boot process, see notes below
- Suspend (kinda works since kernel 3.16 or so, but screen backlight may stay on, and various things may not survive the resume, e.g. touchscreen or rotation)
Not working
- Venue 8 Pro onboard Bluetooth
- Icon for rotation app is invisible with recent GNOME
- Most likely lots of other things
Unknown (please let me know!)
- Hardware support (wireless, bluetooth etc) on devices other than Venue 8 Pro
Usage
Not for 64-bit firmwares
64-bit firmware Bay Trail devices are showing up now: I wouldn’t recommend using Fedlet on those, probably, as most of the point of Fedlet is to be a 32-bit UEFI image for the 32-bit firmware Bay Trail devices. If you have a 64-bit firmware Bay Trail device, I’d probably suggest installing Fedora 21 Beta (or a Final TC/RC) then updating to a 3.18 kernel from the rawhide-kernel-nodebug repository. I could do a 64-bit build of the Fedlet kernel and the few other divergent packages, I guess.
Writing the image to USB
You can follow the standard Fedora USB writing instructions – both livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr --efi and dd like methods should work. Do not use Rufus, unetbootin or any other ‘smart’ third party USB stick writer. They rarely work correctly, especially for UEFI booting. Tools that work like dd (several are mentioned on the page linked above) are fine.
Booting from USB on Venue 8 Pro
To boot from USB on the Venue 8 Pro, turn it off, connect the USB stick, then hold down the volume up button immediately after pressing the power button, until you see the Dell logo. This should take you into a boot menu from which you can pick your USB stick. You can also hold volume down to get into the firmware UI, where you can go to the Boot tab and move the USB stick up to the top position in the boot order (see note above about how different boot paths impact graphics).
Notes and tips
Native graphics on Venue 8 Pro
It seems to vary between devices, but I have found that graphics don’t work properly on the Venue 8 Pro (screen goes black when KMS kicks in) if you boot normally or through the firmware UI (hold volume down on boot). KMS always works if you boot through the boot device menu (hold volume up on boot). If you have a V8P and you’re getting the black-screen-on-boot problem, try different boot paths.
Sound
On most hardware, you should be able to make sound work with this ALSA state file. Download it and run alsactl -f /path/to/t100_B.state restore.
Connecting USB devices
If you don’t know this already you probably shouldn’t be playing with Fedlet, but in order to connect any USB devices, you need something called a “USB OTG cable”, which basically turns the micro-USB port on the tablet into a ‘regular’ USB port you can plug keyboards and USB sticks and things into. Available at any decent parts retailer for about $5, or any big box electronics store for about $25. Your choice.
If wifi isn’t working on your device, you can plug in a wireless USB adapter if you have a USB OTG adapter. I’m using an Asus USB-N10, it should work out of the box.
For ease of testing it’s probably a good idea to have a USB hub you can plug a wireless adapter (if needed), USB stick(s) and keyboard into.
Firefox extensions
The grab-and-drag and Go-Mobile extensions for Firefox are probably useful things to have.
Video playback acceleration
If you are legally allowed to – I can’t tell you whether you are or not, I am not a lawyer – you can install the libva-intel-driver package from RPM Fusion’s free repository. This will enable hardware-accelerated video playback in any app which speaks libva (for me, it fails on quite a few videos, have to dig into that).
Installation
If you’re very, very bold, you should be able to install Fedlet. On the Venue 8 Pro, the internal storage has a fairly big NTFS partition with Windows on it, and a bunch of smaller partitions. I’d recommend just destroying the big Windows partition and installing into that space: the other partitions are system and recovery partitions, if you leave them intact, it should be possible to recover the Windows installation later if you want to (I have not tested this).
If you do install this, get kernel updates from [my repository][19], and don’t install official kernel updates from the Fedora repos. We’re trying to get all the patches merged ASAP. I’ll try and remember to put updated kernel builds in my repo regularly. Stock kernels will now boot, at least, but (as of 3.16) shutdown/reboot may not work, battery status won’t work, and Venue 8 Pro wifi won’t work.
On the Venue 8 Pro at least, the firmware has an irritating habit of putting the Windows boot loader back at the top of the UEFI boot manager list if you attach or remove USB sticks (or sometimes, just for giggles). If you boot it with this setup it’ll go into Windows auto-recovery. I haven’t been brave enough to see what this does yet, I just force power off and go back into the firmware and put Fedlet (“Generic”) back at the top of the list.
What’s in it that’s different from Fedora?
The ‘sources’ for the outside-of-Fedora stuff that’s included in the image can be found in this github repository. There are:
- Some kernel patches in the kernel/ directory which are applied to the kernel package in the image
- Some Xorg config snippets and a trivial utility for rotating the screen on the Venue 8 Pro, in the xorg/ directory
- The kickstart used to build the image, and a patch to python-imgcreate for building UEFI bootable 32-bit live images, in the ks/ directory
- The patch that (hopefully) makes installation work smoothly in the anaconda/ directory
- The necessary firmware for the Venue 8 Pro’s wifi adapter in the baytrail-firmware/ directory
- The repository definition for the fedlet repo in the fedlet-repo/ directory
- A (hopefully) working ALSA configuration file in the alsa/ directory
The packages that differ from pure Fedora Rawhide are all available from [this repository][19]. There is:
- A patched anaconda which should allow installation to work cleanly
- The kernel package patched with the patches from the git repository
- The fedlet-repo package containing the repository definition
- A package of the v8p-rotate utility
- The baytrail-firmware package, currently containing only Venue 8 Pro wireless firmware (license proprietary-but-freely-redistributable)
- A backport of Rawhide’s linux-firmware package, which contains the firmware needed for the sound adapter
All the variant packages have the dist tag ‘awb’ to make them easily distinguishable from official Fedora packages (except the linux-firmware package, which is just a backport).
The image should be roughly reproducible by just building a live image, using the kickstart, from a running Fedora 21 system, after applying the patch to python-imgcreate’s /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/imgcreate/live.py.
I cannot take any of the credit for the hard work on this: all I’ve done is write silly little scripts and stick the bits together. Multiple folks at Intel, Red Hat and elsewhere have done the tough work. An especial big thanks to Alan Coxm Aubrey Li, and Mika Westerberg at Intel, Jan-Michael Brummer at IAV (formerly of Intel), and Kalle Valo at Qualcomm (for the V8P wifi) who are really pushing the thing along.
hello,
can you help me, i search for a way to dual boot android on my dell venue 8 pro?
Thank you
No, sorry. I don’t work on Android, don’t know anything about Android dev stuff, and am not terribly interested in it. I want a tablet that *doesn’t* run Android. π
here here
ok i would like to run android apps and games… what are the advantages of fedora?
I think you probably want to follow http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2500078 and maybe http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2602070 . Basically, you want to be at xda-developers, not here. That’s where they care about Android.
I have the 20140226 build up and running well on the t100, installed to hard drive (I wiped the windows) just the known issues, no sound, uses only external wifi. The touch screen is great better than the win8 ver. Gnome works very well with the touch screen.
Only wish is two finger scrolling for the touch pad, looking forward to the next release, anything I can do to help testing let me know.
Keep up the great work..! thanks!
Cool! With 0226, sound ought to work if you grab the firmware and put it in the right place…
Hats off to you.
You are doing a great job.
Keep up the good work.
I hope this project evolves into a bigger one.
It’d be nice if the community got involved with many devs working on it.
Thanks! That’s not the plan, though: I don’t really want to spend my life building this thing, the idea is just to get all the fixes and patches merged upstream, so Fedlet can be as little different from stock Fedora as possible. It may even be that stock Fedora 21 will work without any modification.
I try fedlet on my w4-820, the last version not boot (power suspend).
With 20140207, that boot, gnome work but anaconda crash, after anaconda update (fedlet repo) i can install on the internal storage. On reboot fedlet crash “reached target basic system” because it not found /dev/mmcblk0pX. If i install on an usb key, that boot correctly. And the sd card reader not work.
anaconda bugs are, well, anaconda bugs – it’s Rawhide, so it’s not uncommon for them to pop up. But the ones I know about from 0207 are fixed, at least. The other bug you hit I know about, it’s https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1063556 . Current Fedlet builds have a patched dracut which ought to fix that bug.
I rebuild initramfs, boot from nand ok. I add file for sound, that works.
Thank
Good work.
Cool, glad it’s working π
Any chance it could work on the Lenovo – Miix 2 8″ ?
It does, yeah. Should work about as well as on the V8P.
This work is very very encouraging for the life of my asus t100!
I’ll try it..
Is it possible to install it on a partition on micro sd card? I have a fast sandisk extreme 64gb micro sd, so it should work fairly well, if kernel support asus t100’s micro sd slot (and dracut load its driver).
I’m a fedora user on my own, I bought a t100 because android is too limiting for doing some real work (vpns, shells and so on). If I can boot fedora.. bye bye windows, or windows only for gaming/office! π
I don’t have a T100 so I can’t be definitive; it depends a bit on how the SD slot is wired up. But if it’s similar to the internal storage on the V8P (which presents as SDHCI over ACPI) then it *should* work, as I had to make that work in order to support installation to the V8P’s storage (there’s a patched version of dracut in the fedlet repos; the patch has gone upstream but there hasn’t been a new dracut release since then, yet).
Could you also add sdhci_pci besides sdhci_acpi ?
Amazing work! Latest 20140310-fedlet-8in-i686.iso worked like a charm on my V8P. Is there any progress on
Dell Wireless 1538 WiFi/BT driver? lspci does not list anything for wifi π Have you tried ndiswrapper?
It’s not connected via PCI, but via SDIO. We know what the hardware is and supporting it would probably be relatively simple…if it actually showed up at all :/ SDIO devices on the V8P just don’t get enumerated by the kernel at all, so there’s nothing for a driver to do anything with. We need to solve that problem before looking at the driver level. You can confirm this by looking in /sys/bus/sdio/devices .
Hi Adamw and thank’s for you amazing job!
I have install fedlet on my sister T100, because I’m crazy and she doesn’t support W8.1 any more!
I have install rpmfusion,libreoffice because she need it and try sound but whitout succes! I found fw_sst_0f28.bin*, first link on google search. But I’m don’t know where I have to but the alsa .state file!
I maybe can help by testing by testing your development on “my” t100. Just tell me what I can update and repository to use.
I have open a thread on Fedora-fr.org but still in french π
thread link : http://forums.fedora-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=61526
Thanks! For the .state file, just put it somewhere convenient, and do this: “alsactl load -f /path/to/t100_B.state” . You should only need to do it once, so long as you shut the system down cleanly the first time you shut down after running that command, the new settings will be saved at shutdown and used from then on.
The fedlet repository – which should be configured on the installed system already – gets all the new fedlet stuff (it’s the same repo I use on my fedlet). You can just do a normal ‘yum update’. However, be careful with kernels: I don’t build new kernels as often as the kernel team does, so sometimes your ‘newest’ kernel will be a stock Fedora one. These boot on the Baytrail systems now, but are still missing some fixes/features from the fedlet kernel builds (sound won’t work, I think neither will shutdown/restart). Make sure you boot a ‘awb’ kernel.
Thanks for trying it out!
I can’t load t100_B.state :
# alsactl load -f /home/estelle/TΓ©lΓ©chargements/t100_B.state
# alsactl: Unknown command ‘load’…
trying with restore & nrestore :
# alsactl restore -f /home/estelle/TΓ©lΓ©chargements/t100_B.state
# ALSA lib conf.c:635:(get_char_skip_comments) Cannot access file !DOCTYPE html
# ALSA lib conf.c:1686:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:6:15:No such file or directory
# alsactl: load_state:1670: snd_config_load error: No such file or directory
SoundCard are present in /settings/sound :
# cat /proc/asound/cards
# 0 [bytrt5640 ]: byt-rt5640 – byt-rt5640
# byt-rt5640
Sound still doesn’t work! And I can’t update to the rc7 kernel from felet.repo :
# kernel-modules-extra-3.14.0-0. FAILED
# …
#
# Error downloading packages:
# kernel-modules-extra-3.14.0-0.rc7.git0.1.2awb.i686: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
# kernel-3.14.0-0.rc7.git0.1.2awb.i686: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
Oh, I need to regen the repo metadata – I took that kernel down because it crashes on boot.
It sounds like you didn’t download the file correctly, if it’s of type HTML. What does ‘file t100_B.state’ say?
# ./t100_B.state: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines
downloaded with wget…
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION!
Some Intel BayTrail tablets may crash and burn by booting this Linux because it reverts this kernel patch:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/23/716
My tablet (Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU Z3740D @ 1.33GHz) crashed. I’ve no regrets (is a testing tablet from the job), I just want to warn everybody.
Best regards!
I’m attempting to install this to a T100
I’ve flashed this to a USB using the command livecd-iso-to-disk –format –reset-mbr –efi fedlet.iso /dev/sdc1. This boots and runs, but as an installation on the USB stick.
I tried running the same command to flash it to the internal SSD but it doesn’t seem to be set up right.
What’s the right way to install this to the internal SSD?
Just run a regular installation from the live USB stick, as if you were installing on a desktop. It’s not designed to be flashed straight to the internal storage, Android-style.
Sorry I haven’t updated it lately, I need to get some round tuits…
Ah right, that must be where I’m going wrong. After flashing to the USB stick using the aforementioned command I end up with the Gnome setup wizard, and no install wizard. It’s as though it’s installed to the USB stick. Am I missing something?
There isn’t an ‘install wizard’, as such. There’s an installer application you can just launch from the overview as with any other app.
>There isnβt an βinstall wizardβ, as such. Thereβs an installer application you can just launch from the overview as with any other app.
I’m afraid I must be missing something obvious. I get the Gnome Initial Setup wizard, where it asks for the country. time zone, username etc on booting the USB. The overview is unavailable until I’ve completed this. And when the overview is available there’s no Install entry in the apps list.
My boot experience is exactly as your linked video, right up until the GUI is displayed.
I assume the think I’m doing wrong is the flashing to USB part. I’ve tried livecd-iso-to-disk βformat βreset-mbr βefi 20140310-fedlet-10in-i686.iso /dev/sdc1 and I’ve tried using Gnome’s Disk Image Writer with the same result.
I’ve done a fair bit of trying to find why this is being a problem for me, and I’ve put a detailed description of my issues installing Fedlet to my T100 here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/234y9y/fedlet_live_usb_boot_on_efi_device_get_setup/
Do you think there’s anything you could suggest which might solve this?
Thanks
Not off the top of my head, no. I’m guessing the livesys service isn’t kicking in for some reason, but I’d have to see the bug to really check why. I haven’t had much time to look at fedlet stuff lately, but I’m planning to try and build new images soon and I’ll see if I see this bug when I do.
Understood. In the mean time would it be possible to try one of the earlier images? There only seems to be the latest in http://adamwill.fedorapeople.org/
I’m afraid not – I don’t have the storage space for them :/ I’ll try and figure it out, sorry for the inconvenience. You may be able to do something like hardwiring livesys.service to start on boot…
Thanks a ton π
It’s working here on a packard bell enme69bmp
never had experience with fedora before but it’s great to have something booting, passing that weird uefi32bits thing
bugs are classic for a notebook: kernel takes long time to boot, secondly a classic resume display corruption, and the last : after the hotdog image appears a blackscreen, you may have to push the power button and/or play with F4/F5 (which are for external screen)
also i cant manage to connect to an hidden wifi
to install on harddrive i had to: set partition scheme on classic partitions, NOT LVM
plus usb is working contrary to experiences with ubuntu by davidlukas.m http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2189855
last updates went fine (needed to register the generic grub in secure boot), and finally the only bug is that i have to strike F4 (xorg detects a phantom second screen) sometime to get to the login screen
youtube videos are a bit sluggy (tried both html5 and flash) but anyway vlc can read those π
Did you install the 20140310 version? What tool did you use to write the image to USB?
latest release, yes
i used the ubuntu disk image writer from another pc
for your issue: do you have (when booting usb key) the following menu:
Start 20140310 Fedlet
Test this media & start 20140310 Fedlet
Troubleshooting –>
After booting Start 20140310 Fedlet
you should find under “Activities”, “Install to Hard Drive”
this is how i did it.
there was a bug with LVM partitionning (maybe cause of the windows install) so i chose normal partitions.
If you have to enable secureboot, make sure to try both grub entries by enabling those from the uefi software, then trying those two.
Hello,
first, i am a complete noob on usb booting, all prior installs of linux have been from live CDs burned using a mac…
all were centos 5.x or mint 12
tried installing this on a lenovo miix 2 8… used rufus on windows to make the usb thumbdrive, selected: gpt, uefi, fat32, left the volume label alone, left the “quick format”, “create bootable disk using”, and “create extended label and icon files” check boxes selected. chose the iso (2014-03-10 8″)
i can reboot into the usb drive, but the volume button/power buttons don’t work, so after a few seconds it boots the “test this media…” selection.
after several minutes of the corrupt boot screen, i get a few lines of text from an attempted boot that ends with the error:
Warning: /dev/disk/by-label/20140310-fedlet-8in-1686 does not exist
apparently i have done something wrong with the rufus building of the usb stick, any tips on how to go about build a good usb stick?
thanks
Use one of the “direct write” methods from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB .
well…
used rawrite32… seemed to work okay. now a different error. buttons still don’t work, so it auto selects the “test media” entry, and now it fails on the media test… and subsequently refuses to boot.
it’s possible you actually have a bad stick, or bad download. but I don’t know if I’ve ever actually run that entry to completion on fedlet, as I usually connect a USB keyboard and skip to the other menu entry.
you could attach the stick to a regular computer and edit the grub config file in /efi/EFI/whatever/blah to make the non-check boot entry the default one.
when i got home i dug up an old usb keyboard, mouse, and USB hub, then i was able to select the first boot entry. after that, everything went fine. I also looked up what it would take to edit the grub config file… apparently not a simple task. i understand that fedlet isn’t remotely close to a real working live/install… but make the first entry the default entry in the grub.cfg if there is ever a next release of fedlet. all in all i appreciate the work you have done on this and thank you for what you have already done…. hoping one day to have a full working tablet so i can toss windows.
eh? it’s really pretty easy – it’s just a text file on the USB stick, you change one character on one line and save it. that’s all there is to it.
Does your work apply to the Dell Venue 8 (non-pro) at all? It’s a baytrail android tab but would be fun to get fedlet onto it.
Thanks!
It would depend a lot on the firmware. I’m not at all familiar with how the firmware is done for Intel Android devices. If it has a UEFI firmware like the V8P I’d expect it’d work fairly similarly, otherwise all bets are off.
Well the difference I can see right now is, the Pro has a 64-bit processor, while a non-Pro has a 32-bit one. Does this make huge difference?
It wouldn’t make much of a difference in itself, no.
No? Nothing to do with x86 vs x86_64 systems?
Fedlet is a 32-bit distro; that’s actually about 90% of the reason for its existence. The V8P and all its cousins (first-gen Baytrail tablets) had 64-bit *CPUs*, but 32-bit UEFI *firmwares*, so they need either 32-bit UEFI bootloaders and 32-bit operating systems (which is what Fedlet is – a UEFI-capable, 32-bit build of grub2 and a 32-bit Fedora build bundled together) or a bootloader capable of booting a 64-bit operating system from a 32-bit UEFI firmware (which is possible, but not the approach I took with fedlet). Fedlet is basically a 32-bit UEFI capable Fedora build (which isn’t something Fedora officially provides) with a few tweaks to a couple of packages.
Hi Adam,
Linux kernel 3.15 is now in Rawhide. I guess your images from March 10th are still using 3.14. I was hoping the new kernel would improve hardware compatibility for my Dell Venue 11 Pro (wifi, touchpad). Are you planning to release a new version?
See the Fedlet status part of https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/05/07/linuxfest-northwest-fedlet-status-fedora-next-work-and-more/ – basically, I’ve been building 3.15 kernels and they’re in the fedlet repo, but there’s a rather major graphics regression which makes me reluctant to use it as a basis for images.
I’ve been seeing this one on my Ubuntu install with 3.15 rc2, bit of a pain becuase I have to keep the screen on permanently, which isn’t great for battery life. Same with the rotation too
@AGui
Where you able to boot fedlet on your Venue 11 Pro? I get to grub starting the boot and then it locks.
Can you define ‘locks’? You’ll need to edit the cmdline to use the correct resolution for the V11P, the correct resolution has to be explicitly listed on the cmdline (this is because we’re basically exploiting a loophole to make the graphics work). The fedlet images come with 800×1280 (8″) or 1366×768 (10″) ‘baked in’. If the native resolution of the V11P is different you’ll have to manually edit it.
I use video=VGA-1:1920×1080:75e for the video. 1920×1080 is the resolution for the 11 Pro. I get …
..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
ioremap error for [snip], requested 0x10, got 0x0
then a bunch of pnp “can’t evaluate _CRS” lines.
Ah, sounds like an actual kernel bug then π Best thing to do is report it to http://bugzilla.kernel.org , with as much of the error as you can capture via photo / video / whatever.
I added acpi=off and removed quiet and rhgb to see more. It ended with a “Kernel panic – not syncing: Machine check from unknown source” after systemd initialized machine ID from random generator.
Oh how a wish these tablet makers would have just included a CSM option in the bios. ARGH!
Ok, thanks for your quick reply. So 3.15 isn’t a good idea for now. We’ll have to wait. Thanks for your amazing work anyway.
Still downloading fedlet as I type so I may be speaking too soon, but from my experience getting Ubuntu to boot on my DVP8, it is possible to get shutdown and reboot to work properly by adding “reboot=pci,force” to the kernel command line. also, thought I might just add that when booting Ubuntu, (fedlet might be the same) to get ungarbled video you can add “nomodeset” to the command line. I found this resulted in very slow performance and massive battery drain. if you replace it with “i915.i915_enable_rc6=1” then performance was actually much better and (believe it or not) battery life was better. Speaking of the battery does anyone else find it a bit annoying that the power port and USB port are one and the same? Damn these embedded systems -_-
Shutdown and reboot work without manual tweaking in Fedlet, I have it patched in the kernel. Ditto graphics, using a better approach than nomodeset – you actually get full acceleration in Fedlet.
And yes, that’s extremely annoying. Someone in another forum came up with an extremely Heath Robinson-esque ‘fix’ for that, somewhere in the bowels of http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/dell/59328-venue-8-usb-power-same-time.html , but I’ve not yet been bold enough to try it.
Hi!
I am buy ASUS T100TA specifically for get the Fedora tablet.
But fedlet is unbootable on my tablet π
Write error message on boot screen:
mmcblk0rpmb: timed out sending r/w cmd command, card status 0x400900
Please help me, I am attach boot screen here: http://imageshack.com/a/img844/3236/ix4s.jpg
Shot in the dark, but could you try booting with ‘sdhci.debug_quirks=64 sdhci.debug_quirks2=0x8000’ ?
It turns system is bootable, but very slowly. need to wait about 6-7 minutes!!!
Does not work:
– WiFi
– Sound
– Bluetooth
– Battery power indicator
– Adjustment of screen brightness
– SD Cardreader
For some reason, the internal drive is defined as mmcblk0, it turns all errors that we see at boot because of it.
http://imageshack.com/a/img837/2699/g1fl.png
$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation ValleyView SSA-CUnit (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation ValleyView Gen7 (rev 09)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation ValleyView USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 09)
00:1a.0 Encryption controller: Intel Corporation ValleyView SEC (rev 09)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ValleyView Power Control Unit (rev 09)
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1005:b113 Apacer Technology, Inc. Handy Steno 2.0/HT203
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0b05:17e0 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
slow boot is unusual, I don’t think others with T100s are seeing that. I can’t say why it would be happening, I’m afraid. wifi and bluetooth not working is known/expected (though may *possibly* work with the latest kernel from the fedlet repo). power indicator not working is expected, should work with the latest kernel from the repo. screen brightness not working is expected (until 3.16, the kernel is actually handling the displays on these devices entirely incorrectly, it’s only by bare luck that they work at all). card reader may work with latest kernel. sound should work if you provide the appropriate firmware files, which I can’t provide too much detail about, but I think I’ve mentioned the filenames here and there, and you can Google them.
> slow boot is unusual, I donβt think others with T100s are seeing that. I canβt say why it would be happening, Iβm afraid.
I hope this helps investigate problem:
http://imageshack.com/a/img835/401/swmm.jpg
after 6min
http://imageshack.com/a/img844/6205/cyog.jpg
$ systemctl status livesys.service
livesys.service – LSB: Init script for live image.
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/livesys)
Active: failed (Result: timeout) since Wed 2014-05-21 22:23:39 YEKT; 3min 6s ago
Process: 724 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/livesys start (code=killed, signal=TERM)
May 21 22:23:39 localhost systemd[1]: livesys.service start operation timed out. Terminating.
May 21 22:23:39 localhost systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Init script for live image..
May 21 22:23:39 localhost systemd[1]: Unit livesys.service entered failed state.
Could you upload fedlet with updated kernel? I want to test it.
Full dmesg: http://pastebin.com/VgLRrKUZ
Don’t worry, you’re far from alone, I get that too. I wasn’t able to get to the LiveUSB on Fedlet because of this – see my comment on this page: http://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet-a-fedora-remix-for-bay-trail-tablets/comment-page-1/#comment-38427
I managed to get Ubuntu installed using this: http://www.jfwhome.com/2014/03/07/perfect-ubuntu-or-other-linux-on-the-asus-transformer-book-t100/. I get the same on there, although it does boot eventually – 50% of boots are successful within ~80 seconds
Also this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=179948#p1403871
How much could this to be to do with whether or not we ran particular firmware updates back on Windows?
Firmware version can certainly have something to do with it. Those two kernel parameters I suggested were passed along by one of the Intel devs I’m talking to, who had trouble installing/booting Linux after doing a firmware update on the Venue 8 Pro. They *may* also affect behaviour of the T100, I guess.
Of course, new models from the factory may have newer firmwares installed, even if you didn’t manually update through Windows before attempting to boot/install Linux.
I did indeed try those kernel paramters on my Ubuntu install (3.15 rc4) to no avail. I put them immediately after the “rw” by editing the grub command at boot, it’s possible I put them in the wrong place
I tested it on my Toshiba Encore, but here it doesn’t work. I hangs at boot (at the time when the graphics get fussy)
A guy in XDA posted a similar Debian based image for ASUS T100
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=52582701&postcount=269
I’ve tested it. The sound works.
Probably you can use his kernel to make a new iso.
sound’s been working in fedlet for weeks, for me and several testers. you have to find the correct firmware files and put them in /usr/lib/firmware/intel ; I can’t legally ship them (if that guy is shipping them, either he got a special license from Intel or he is breaking the license). The firmware files have names based on ‘fw_sst’.
For the mmcblk0rpmb errors, there’s a new kernel patch here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mmc/24260
Apparently, “It occurs only on newer versions of the t100 as it contains an emmc device by a different manufacturer (Hynix) from the one used in earlier models (SanDisk.)” – http://www.jfwhome.com/2014/03/07/perfect-ubuntu-or-other-linux-on-the-asus-transformer-book-t100/
If you can’t legally ship them it means stock kernel will never work? π
Intel tell me they’re planning to re-license the firmware appropriately to go into linux-firmware – but right now, it’s only available from a Chromium repo with a license intended for hardware OEMs, not really for distro-type redistribution.
Ok, when will it happen? I am ready to donate money for it and sign the petition.
Any updates?
sorry, haven’t looked at the audio firmware specifically lately, too busy fighting other stuff.
edit: edit: crap, I did a search which indicates the firmware should be downloadable in some Tizen IVI support package, but I can’t find the actual package, only the PDF listing its contents. le sigh. I’ll get back to Intel on this.
Any chance we’ll see a version of this which includes kernel 3.16? No amount of fiddling around with kernel flags can get this 3.14 kernel to not panic before even systemd comes up and I believe 3.16 is supposed to handle these devices much better (I’m on a Venue 11 Pro 5130).
Going to try frankensteining the latest Arch ISO kernel onto this thing in the meantime. Thanks!
There are already 3.16 kernels in the repo. I haven’t posted images based on it because it black screens on my tablet, so I can’t test them properly, and I don’t want to post untested stuff. I have a proper bug report in for the 3.16 black screen on my V8P now, so I’m hoping that’ll get fixed and I can post updated images. Early 3.17 appears to be DOA on my test device, but I haven’t had time to investigate in detail yet.
Darn, I’m assuming if you get a black screen on the V8P then the V11P won’t be any better off (though I may set up a Fedora VM to build an image with regardless (I’m an Arch user so building these images isn’t something I can just do with a yawn :P))
Thanks for the response, though. I’m still curious as to why the V11P has so many problems booting the image you currently have up, when it works on the V8P… makes no sense to me given they’re essentially the same device, with different screens (and a USB3 port + miniHDMI out on the 11 of course)
Is the patch to python-imgcreate not in Git or am I just missing something?…
It’s in the ks/ directory.
All I see in that directory are the two kickstarts for 8 and 10 inch devices, no patch.
whoops, looks like I forgot to git add it – try again.
I now get a 404 error with livecd-creator, trying to reach http://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet/repo/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml (raises a yum.Errors.NoMoreMirrorsRepoError exception)
Maybe you could release a built image to the wild with a giant warning label on it (more than the one at the top of this page warning not to use it in production :P) that it’s untested? Because recreating your image seems to be an uphill climb (and so far your image is the only thing that’s gotten past a Grub menu on my Venue 11 Pro, even if it did almost immediately kernel panic. I’ve tried at least 10 setups so far…)
Fixed, your kickstart in Git needs to point at your https:// url, as http:// gives a 404 (also had to setarch to i686 for livecd-creator since obviously you haven’t build 64-bit packages)
The 404 was actually caused by me messing up some config on my production server (testing? I’ve heard of it), sorry about that.
As a programmer/DevOps hybrid myself I can totally relate to goofing configs on live sites, no worries π
Working on building the livecd now (about 900 packages down, 300 to go). I’ll let you know if it gets past a bootloader (which, as I’ve mentioned, would be impressive enough…)
Well, I don’t get a black screen, but I really don’t get anything better, creating a brand new LiveCD image off rawhide. Goes from GRUB to printing this string (and seemingly crashing): “l nl nl nl nl nl nl n”
C’est la vie. Back to Windows 8 for a bit.
Is that with a 3.17 kernel? That’s exactly what I’m getting with 3.17 ATM. 3.16 boots fine except for the black screen, though (I can ssh in). Try a 3.16. (So, build off 21, not Rawhide.)
Just unpacked my miix2 8 with the intent (or just plain hope) that I can get Fedora and Gnome working on it. I now realise that while I am *far* closer to having a Fedora tablet than I was 24 hours ago (by having one that has already run Fedora in one form or another), there is still so much I need to get a handle on. Finding the work going on here is great news so, for the moment, can I just chip in with some applause and thanks for your efforts. Hopefully I can get past the onlooker phase and chip in where I can. Regards, Jeff.
adamw, Fedora 21 prealpha was out https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2014-08-28_Gnome_3.14
But both images is unbottable, tablet don’t see that stick with Fedora 21 is bootable π
well, of course, standard Fedora images aren’t 32-bit UEFI bootable. That’s why fedlet exists. F21 images are generated nightly, there’s nothing special about the GNOME test day images, we used the most recent nightly builds.
Oh and I thought all the achievements Fedlet be integrated into the original Fedora. It is a pity.
The way fedlet does it is an ugly hack, not really appropriate for upstream merging. For a start, as implemented, it breaks 64-bit UEFI boot – the Fedlet images won’t boot on a normal 64-bit UEFI machine. That wouldn’t be too hard to fix, but it’s also not Secure Boot compatible, and that’d be a lot more work.
There’s some interest in supporting the 32-bit Baytrail devices somehow in mainstream Fedora, but there are higher priorities too, so it may or may not happen…
But Fedora exists not only in x86-64, also have x86 version. Why in x86 version, we can not use the 32bit UEFI?
Fedora has never supported 32-bit UEFI by policy (until the Baytrail hardware came along, there was no 32-bit UEFI hardware we’re interested in). Adding UEFI support to the 32-bit images would make them larger and actually break some elements of bootability on old BIOS systems, AIUI.
Before the 32-bit Baytrail devices showed up, 32-bit UEFI just didn’t really work on Linux period; in the very early days of Fedlet we hit quite a lot of showstopper bugs in the kernel’s UEFI code that only showed up when you ran on 32-bit.
For anyone wanting to run Linux on a Bay Trail Atom device, at the moment your best bet is a VirtualBox VM with 1GB RAM allocated to guest, raw mounted micro SD card and a lightweight Linux distribution such as CrunchBang.
Make sure you enable host IO caching. Without that I’ve been experiencing intermittent SD card errors. I have not seen a single one since I’ve enabled host caching
And don’t even bother trying anything that runs Gnome, KDE or Unity. It’s painful and it seems more so because of the SD card than low memory as the exact same VM worked fine if ran from a normal hard drive. Disabling swap had no effect either. So yeah, stay away from Gnome 3 and Unity.
Other than that it works really well, and you get to use the Windows on-screen keyboard to interact with Linux as a bonus.
Thanks for your hard work on this Adam. I was able to run Fedlet on my Miix2 (3G version,huawei) and it runs very nicely. The 3G device was detected and gets as far as registering on the 3G network (Vodafone PAYG), but after that it fails to connect (after the login part of the connection). The strange thing is that it appeared to work the first time I ran fedlet, albeit very slowly, so I am thinking maybe the vodafone network is rejecting the miix+fedora as an unknown device and blocking it? If I connect a 3G usb dongle (vodafone, huawei) with the same sim card to fedlet+Miix2, it connects ok.
I was able to build a bootable OS from the kickstart (or any valid kickstart will work), fedora 21 and rawhide with the help of your live.py patch, but I was unable to get the touchscreen working (also 3g device not detected anymore, and prob other hardware) even after installing all the xorg*1awb rpms (i did not install your gnome-shell). I recompiled the kernel (using default i686 config, I have yet to try the fedlet config in boot) with your patches but that didn’t help. Apart from your fedlet build, I always had to enable nomodeset upon boot to get graphics. Thanks, Rob.
O and one more thing, the installer fails when trying to partition the drive, it doesnt seem to be able to complete formatting. Gnome-disks also fails to format the (built in mmc) disk. I had created a usb windows8 recovery disk beforehand so I was able to restore ok.
>I had created a usb windows8 recovery disk beforehand so I was able to restore ok.
I wiped my recovery partition ages ago, but obviously still have the read-only disk with the actual Windows on it. Could you help me out with a recovery disk?
I recently bought an ASUS T100 Transformer and could never have imagined that it would be this much trouble to install Linux to it. Fedlet is the only “distro” that I have been able to even boot from. I was able to use it to blast Windows 8 off of the 64 GB SSD, but I can’t install Fedlet. I can go through the software installation successfully, but it always produces an error while trying to install the bootloader. If any quick/easy fix thoughts pop into your head, please mention them.
Thanks!
It’s because the image is missing a package that the bootloader needs, adamw has stated he intends to put out a new image with the required package
Link: https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/09/12/new-fedlet-build-finally/comment-page-1/#comment-301406
You are doing a great job here!!
I tried the latest fedlet (20140911) on my asus T100 and the essential stuff works well: we have battery monitor/charge, video is perfect, sound works. However, I have only one problem: I was unable to record sounds from microphone! Is there a way to fix this problem? (I developed a linux app that need the microphone to function properly). I load alsa configuration using alsactl and the output sound works. In alsamixer I was able to see a capture device, changing its volume, but using arecord nothing is recorded (just low volume noise).
Could you help me?
Thanks in advance,
g
It’s almost certainly just a case of mixer settings. There’s a whole bunch that control rather low-level card settings, and you probably just need to tweak something there like we had to tweak things there to get playback working. I’ll ask the Intel sound folks if they know what needs setting.
I’ll try to play with alsa settings….
Let me know if you find something!
Thanks a lot for you wonderful job with fedlet.
There are more than a hundred controls on rt5640! I am not an alsa guru (I barely understand the meaning of each setting) but I’m trying to switch on/off each one, hoping that the microphone issue strictly depends on only one control.
Anyhow, if you know some guy able to solve this issue, could you ask him for any suggestions?
Thanks.
Hi Adam, any news from Intel sound folks?
I have tried almost all possible mixer combinations without results on audio recording (using internal microphone e an external one via the jack port).
However I discovered that audio playback on speakers only needs these controls on:
Speaker
Speaker L
Speaker R
DAC1
Stereo DAC MIXR DAC R1
Stereo DAC MIXL DAC L1
DAC MIXL INF1
DAC MIXL STEREO ADC
DAC MIXR INF1
DAC MIXR STEREO ADC
SPOL MIX DAC L1
SPOL MIX DAC R1
anyone make it working with MIIX 2 10″οΌ I always got emergency mode. MIIX 2 10″ uses an ATOM baytrail-m 3740 SoC.
I notice the 20140911 image has a new bullet point “Install broken (missing efibootmgr)”. Does that mean it still needs a new image to get past the bootloader install, or is there a way to install with the 20140911 image?
It needs a new image, I’ve been slacking on getting around to it. I’ll try and do it today.
any news on that? I’m trying to put this on a T100 and the goal is to have this as the main and only OS on it π
sorry, I actually did an RC6 kernel build to go with it the other day but then got sandbagged by a sudden desire to do massive wiki overhauls. Once I dig my way out of this mound of tabs I’ll get on it…
Adam,
Great work on Fedlet, really cool to be able to boot into Fedora on a tablet. I’ve recently acquired a Micro Center branded 10.1 inch BayTrail-T tablet for $199(!) and I’m in the process of attempting to get Fedlet working on it. I know its BayTrail-T rather than M, but I just thought you should know the usual stuff (wifi, sound) doesn’t work along with touch, but everything else seems to.
The panel shows in Windows as “Goodix Touch HID”, but apparently these are already supported in 3.16, so I’m not sure what the deal is. I don’t see anything in lspci or lsusb, though I saw you were having similar issues on xda-developers with things that you have since gotten working.
Wish me luck and keep up the good work.
The touchscreen on the V8P ‘magically’ started working around kernel 3.13 for me, I didn’t have to do anything to make it work, so I never really looked into the details of how to do that, I’m afraid π If you find any possible fixes, let me know and I can see about building them for you.
I got the latest image to boot my T100. Neat. Is there a reason why you didn’t include the gadget USB drivers? These would be nice to have on a device like this given that it has a type B USB port and could easily be used to emulate a storage or serial device.
Have you made the kernel sources available somewhere? It would be easy enough to build my own modules, I guess…
“Is there a reason why you didnβt include the gadget USB drivers?”
Well, would you take “I don’t know what those are” as a reason? π Is it something that allows the system to appear as a USB mass storage or similar to another system?
“Have you made the kernel sources available somewhere?”
Of course! I work for Red Hat! This isn’t xda-developers, or something. π The repository has a SRPMS directory – https://www.happyassassin.net/fedlet/repo/SRPMS/ – which *should* always have the SRPMs for all current builds in the binary repo (and hence on images). I’m trying to keep as many of the older SRPMs that are on the older image builds around as I can (though the server VM is kinda running out of space). The 3.17rc4 kernel package is there. I also have a repo at https://github.com/AdamWill/baytrail-m which contains various little bits and pieces, including the individual kernel patches that constitute the current diff against the Fedora kernel (though I don’t put the config file changes in there, which I probably should). Of course, the patches and config are in the .src.rpm.
It should be _relatively_ easy to reconcile my changes from the .src.rpm with a ‘fedpkg clone –anonymous’ of the Fedora kernel package git repo – see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_maintenance_guide , which I just wrote last night… – and rebase the changes against current Fedora kernel master and get an up-to-date build, there’s not much real magic to it. Or you could just wait for me to get around to uploading a newer build, of course.
I keep meaning to upload my actual branch of the fedpkg repo somewhere, but again, never get the round tuits.
Sorry – missed the SRPMS directory. My bad. I’ll look again.
Yes, the USB gadget drivers are super cool. They allow your tablet to play almost anything you want. It can Be an ethernet device (and share it’s wifi with another computer – just like an Android phone when you do USB tethering). It can be a storage device and allow a computer to store data in a “backing store”. It can be a USB serial device. Etc.
It’s that last feature that I want to use, btw. I’m working on reverse engineering support for a dive computer in Subsurface. The dive computer shows up as USB serial device when connecting it to a computer. So I can easily trace what it’s doing while talking to the vendor software. So I can see how the vendor software accesses the dive computer – but it’s still a pain to figure out what all the data that is being transmitted actually MEANS. I can make educated guesses about a big chunk of this, but there’s still a ton to be uncovered.
Now imagine turning my T100 into a USB serial gadget and connecting it to the Windows system running the vendor application. Based on the trace I can easily write a little state machine that acts just like the dive computer would when connected to the vendor app (heck, I can even connect the dive computer to another port and forward the requests to it and simply play man in the middle). But this is where the cool stuff comes in. I can now fiddle with the data. Change individual bits and bytes. And I can see what the vendor application shows when that happens. Which allows me to figure out how the dive computer works.
We’ve been doing this for years with serial devices as for those such a “fake device” is trivial to do. For USB it’s much harder and I hope that the T100 will make this much easier.
Sorry, long explanation, but I figured it would explain why I’m looking for this π
I’ll look at the SRPMs and see if this is enough to create the modules I need. Without being to install on the T100 that’s going to be a pain, though. Can’t wait for you to upload the next version that fixes that.
Big pile of kudos!
/D
Heh. Minor snag. Just noticed that my T100 doesn’t see its wireless. And until I can install to disk the 1 regular USB port that I have is used by the memory stick. So I can’t download the SRPM π
Why do you need to download it to the T100? I do my builds from my desktop. OK, I use the Fedora build system, but it’s easy enough to set up x64->x32 cross-compile any number of other ways (using Mock would be a Fedora-ish one).
Can’t reply to your comment π
I do of course run Fedora… I’ll look into setting up mock to do this.
I’m also having one of my coworkers figure out why it can’t find the brcm firmware… apparently there is some hidden EFI variable you need to poke at… I’ll let you know what I learn, maybe you can include that in a future version π
It should literally be just:
mock -r fedora-21-i386 –rebuild package.src.rpm
it’ll go set up a 32-bit buildroot and build it for you, easy peasy.
well, sort of… I need to change the kernel config… and as I found out, add a couple of patches for wifi to work… and then I need an updated initrd, don’t I?
well, I just meant that’s all you need for the *building* side of it. Of course you have to make the modifications to the package.
When you install a Fedora kernel package or build it into a live image, some hooks will cause an initramfs to be generated.
Tried it on my T100TAS. With boot options “verbose reboot=pci,force”, I get
“[OK] Reached target Basic System”
Then the boot hangs for a while, then prints some more lines and drops to emergency shell.ο»Ώ
Any idea what’s causing this and how to fix it?
I suspect the reason is this (though fedlet doesn’t print anything related, this is the reason other distros I try hang at boot; they eventually boot, though): https://dev-nell.com/rpmb-emmc-errors-under-linux.html. If so, how should I go for patching the ISO?
“Any idea whatβs causing this and how to fix it?”
Not really, though it’s odd that some people report T100 working and some report not. ‘reboot=pci’ shouldn’t be needed but I doubt it’d *hurt* anything, IIRC that codepath is only hit on shutdown. If you pass ‘verbose’ but don’t remove the default Fedora ‘rhgb quiet’ parameters they may fight a bit unpredictably, I’d suggest removing ‘rhgb quiet’ as well, maybe you’ll get more debug output?
What are the ‘lines’ it prints?
“If so, how should I go for patching the ISO?”
I have a vague recollection someone pointed me at that and it’s to do with newer systems with 64-bit firmwares only, but it’s a very vague recollection. To generate a Fedlet build you’d need to patch the kernel (as I hand-wavingly explained to Dirk, above) then use the ”livecd-creator” tool, with my small patch to python-imgcreate to make it spit out 32-bit UEFI images – https://github.com/AdamWill/baytrail-m/blob/master/ks/python-imgcreate-32uefi.patch – and run it using the fedlet kickstart – https://github.com/AdamWill/baytrail-m/blob/master/ks/fedlet.ks – on top of the current state of the f21 branch of https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/spin-kickstarts.git/ (make sure to use f21 branch, not ‘master’, which is rawhide). My livecd-creator invocation is:
linux32 livecd-creator -v –releasever=21 –tmpdir=/home/adamw/local/live/tmp/ –cache=/home/adamw/local/live/cache/ -f 20140911-fedlet-i686 live_bleed_venue.ks
obviously, adjust for your situation.
It’s not only Fedlet. With Ubuntu, some people report mmcblk0rpmb I/O errors, but most don’t. I experience them with many builds of Ubuntu (14.04 x64, 14.10 x64, 14.10 x86). There, I get the I/O errors for some time (different every boot), but eventually the installer goes on and boots. I have a 32 bit UEFI and I’ve tried both 32 and 64 bit OS, and the rpmb partition I/O errors aren’t limited to 64 bit firmware. Most people don’t seem to have any problems. My best guess is that things work on the 2013 models of T100, but not on the 2014 models. Can’t confirm or disprove, since most people don’t usually say exactly which model they have.
I did remove “rhgb quiet” when I added the verbose and reboot options. If I didn’t, rhgb simply overrides verbose.
Is there an easier way to save the lines that are printed at boot than copy them on a piece of paper?
Oh, yeah, I think I also vaguely recall something about firmware versions for the V8P and MMC errors. Sigh, need to check my mail again.
“Is there an easier way to save the lines that are printed at boot than copy them on a piece of paper?”
Yeah, we have this remarkable invention known as a ‘camera’ =) Seriously, ‘take a picture and stick it up somewhere’ is a relatively accepted method of reporting early boot failure if you aren’t fortunate enough to have a serial console. To the extent that there’s a rather ingenious proposal floating around somewhere to generate QR codes for kernel backtraces…
Here’s the boot hang screen and some of the output of journalctl:
http://postimg.org/image/imt21pfb3/
http://postimg.org/image/9jdh3k67h/
http://postimg.org/image/ct5ofhb9j/
http://postimg.org/image/50q9occb7/
http://postimg.org/image/ws0z6akfp/
http://postimg.org/image/gcn0rbbsd/
http://postimg.org/image/sis2gizpv/
So I am trying to boot fedlet on a dell latitude 10 tablet it had a dual core clovertrail intel atom soc rather than a 4 core baytrail. It seems to be an interesting case because it will boot up until right after it executes the boot configuration. It gets into grub and tries to boot but all we get is a black screen. I think it would be nice to get this working on these tablets as it seems something has changed on these newer ones.
Thoughts?
Confirmed same scenario on my Latitude 10.
Got so excited when I saw the new kernel SRPM… but still no new release with working installer. π
On the plus side, I was able to use mock to build a new kernel – but unless I can install Fedlet on the internal drive, I don’t think there’s a way I can install that…
I know, random whine from a random stranger. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I totally appreciate the work that this takes. I just feel like I’m /so/close/ to have the thing that I need for my own open source project to make progress
The new kernel regressed battery status, which is why I didn’t do a build with it (well, I did a build, I didn’t release it). At that point it was 3am so I sort of wanted to sleep.
I just need to do another kernel build with the older patch for battery status and then I’ll get a live image out. I do have a life to live and a zillion other projects to work on…
“I do have a life to live and a zillion other projects to work on⦔
my apologies. I’ll stop bothering you.
I’ve downloaded the 20140929 version twice and both times the sha1sum was d51abac109b9f87cd254ea575d7ea7adf0430cea. Did you update the iso after calculating the sha1sum of “aa2f1150e4…”?
In any case, thanks for your work on making this hardware usable π
It’s an sha256sum. sha1sums are *so* 2012…:)
Tried the 20140929 release on my T100TAS 2014 model. I get the same problem as I described above and drop to emergency shell: http://postimg.com/image/168000/1412059816516-167279.jpg
Ah, I can see that image better than the others. The “does not exist” errors most likely indicate that we’re not building the correct driver for the storage device you’re booting from into the initramfs. Are you booting from a USB stick or SD card?
USB
The boot directory in the EFI directory is capitailized and the bootia32.EFI file is also capitialized my Lenovo MIIX2 can not find it to boot from. Also the partition table look very strange to me. It says the 1.1GB first partition is Empty. Also the First “Empty” partition is marked as boot instead of the EFI partition
those things are normal for Fedora USB sticks, it’s a complex layout because it has to boot on MBR (including old systems with some quirks), regular UEFI, and Macs. The capitalization of /EFI/BOOT is according to the UEFI spec. The partition marked as ‘Bootable’ does not matter for UEFI boot purposes, the UEFI spec does not take account of it.
The disk label is fairly weird, and your tool may well not read it correctly. parted and fdisk both struggle. GNOME Disks shows the partition layout correctly.
mjg59 has a detailed breakdown of the design of Fedora lives at http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/11285.html . Fedlet should mostly follow that still, I believe.