Trim Slice pt 3

Getting Fedora on this is hard work, but I managed it in the end.

To save you some time, I’ll tell you that you need to get a null modem cable, a Linux computer with a serial port, and a USB drive (anything 1GB or over).

Who uses serial ports? Evidently the manufacturers of modern PCs don’t think we need them because I discovered that I have only one working PC in the house left that has a serial port. USB-to-serial adapters and null modem cables are esoteric pieces of equipment, which tells me that ARM / Fedora / Fedora-on-ARM has a long way to go to make this usable for the common man.

There is also no Anaconda or installer for Fedora yet, so installation is quite unlike installing Fedora on a PC. It starts with a root filesystem which contains a minimal set of RPMs already installed, and you somehow have to get that on to the machine yourself.

Luckily the U-Boot ROM that comes with the Trim Slice is simple to understand (relatively speaking) and I managed to get Fedora/ARM to boot first time, even with my custom boot script. I followed the instructions here.

To get the root filesystem onto the internal SD card, I first installed it on the external USB drive, then booted Fedora from that, then copied it over the internal Ubuntu, then rebooted into that.

Finally, the SD drive is slooowwww (although the dual core Tegra 2 processor is pretty nippy). Running yum is much slower than normal (which is saying something). To get around this I’m using NFSv4 /home and temporary directories, so I can do things like builds in a faster place.

In the end, I do have a good, quite fast, ARM build server on my network.

A quick note about 64 bit Fedora Windows cross-compiler

I don’t often talk about the Fedora Windows cross-compiler project which I guess I helped to start back in 2008.

However last week some legal uncertainty about the 64 bit compiler was lifted and Erik van Pienbroek and Kalev Lember have been doing an amazing job getting a full 32 + 64 bit cross-compiler chain into Fedora 17.

The upshot of this is incredible: From a single code-base, you can build, on Fedora, a Linux binary, 32- and 64- bit Windows binaries, and (with a tiny bit of proprietary code) Mac OS X binaries. This includes cross-platform graphical programs (using Gtk), and over a hundred libraries for graphics, sound, games, networking, databases and much more. It’s not just plain binaries either, mingw-w64 includes a credible DDK replacement so you can build Windows device drivers too.

Trimslice (ARM PC)

I just ordered one of these: Trimslice Value for a total price inc delivery and tax of £262. It is reputed to be a reasonable ARM desktop/server (in contrast to the Sheevaplug which was an arse to get working). I’ll let you know how it goes …

SSH key change

I have to log in to post a reply to this, so I’ll write a short reply here instead:

Kevin, you are calling group 3 a “vocal minority”. But you present no hard data about how many people are actually in each group. So there is no evidence on which to say that this group is a minority, or even that the responses break down into these four groups at all. You hope that group 2 is large, but where’s the evidence that people really did check their firewalls and re-enable SELinux as a result of this pointless key change?

Experimental libguestfs 1.14 scratch builds for Fedora 14, 15, 16

For Fedora 16:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3474798

For Fedora 15:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3474878

For Fedora 14:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3475545

Note, for a quick libguestfs and virt tools test the only packages you need to install are libguestfs and libguestfs-tools-c. To test a few more tools, install libguestfs-tools and perl-Sys-Guestfs as well.

A 685K Fedora appliance

Using supermin appliances we can make some very small to download Fedora appliances. These ones are under 700K (yes, that’s “K” not “M”).

For Fedora 15, use this link:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3421870

For Fedora 16, use this link:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3421867

For Rawhide, use this link:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3421803

You will need ~600 MB free space in /var/lib since that is where the real appliance gets built. Just install the RPM and run sudo boot-a-fedora-appliance. Then read that script and the README file.

Upstream source:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=a-fedora-appliance.git;a=summary

Fedora 16 Virtualization test day

Come and help us test the virtualization features in Fedora 16, this Thursday (15th September).

Go here for more details:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-15_Virtualization

Nice RPM / git patch management trick

As far as I know, this trick was invented by Peter Jones. Edit: Or it could be ajax?

Parted in Fedora uses a clever method to manage patches with git and “git am”.

%prep
%setup -q
# Create a git repo within the expanded tarball.
git init
git config user.email "..."
git config user.name "..."
git add .
git commit -a -q -m "%{version} baseline."
# Apply all the patches on top.
git am %{patches}

The background is that there is a git repo somewhere else which stores the unpacked baseline parted tarball, plus patches (stored as commits) on top.

I assume that Peter exports the commits using git format-patch. At build time these are applied on top of the tarball using git am.

There are two clear advantages:

• No need to have lots of duplicate %patch lines in the spec file.
• git-am restores permissions and empty files properly, which regular patch does not do.

With libguestfs in RHEL 6 we have roughly 80 patches, so managing these patches is very tedious, and this will greatly simplify things.

Guestfs-browser is now in Fedora

The guest filesystem browser is now in Fedora (15+).

Thanks to Ankur Sinha for the review.

Fedora package for libguestfs 1.12

There is now a Fedora package for libguestfs 1.12. It requires Rawhide or the soon-to-be-branched Fedora 16.

There are two kernel or qemu bugs which prevent us from running the full test suite (723555, 723822), so we’ve only been able to do the “quick check”. So some bits might be broken.