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.
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.
Eleventh release of Fedlet.
Tenth release of Fedlet.
Ninth release of Fedlet.
i915.force_backlight_pmic=1
Eighth release of Fedlet.
generic-release-cloud
not generic-release-workstation
, sorry, I'll fix it for the next releaseSeventh release of Fedlet, aka the "God, I'm still doing this?" release
Sixth release of Fedlet
Fifth release of Fedlet
Fourth release of Fedlet
/usr/lib/firmware/intel
and apply this mixer config), shutdown/reboot should work on Venue 8 Pro, T100 and Miix 2Third release of Fedlet
Second release of Fedlet
First release of Fedlet
i915.force_backlight_pmic=1
)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.
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.
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).
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.
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
.
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.
The grab-and-drag and Go-Mobile extensions for Firefox are probably useful things to have.
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).
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.
The 'sources' for the outside-of-Fedora stuff that's included in the image can be found in this github repository. There are:
The packages that differ from pure Fedora Rawhide are all available from [this repository][19]. There is:
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.