A few months ago, Hans de Goede, currently working at Red Hat and a Fedora contributor, started to show up on linux-sunxi mailing list, and sent a lot of kernel patches for linux-sunxi kernel. Last week-end, he announced “Fedora 18 Final for Allwinner A10 and A13 based devices” on linux-sunxi community mailing list.
To install it, first download the image:
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wget http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/contrib-images/hansg/Fedora-18-a10-armhfp-r1.img.xz |
And write it to an SD card (all data will be wiped out):
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xzcat Fedora-18-a10-armhfp-r1.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk0 |
You may have to replace “/dev/mmcblk0” by your own SD card device, e.g. “/dev/sdc”.
AllWinner based devices can share the same kernel, but u-boot is board/products specific, so you’ll have to install u-boot for your board. First remove the SD card, re-insert it in order to automatically mount the FAT partition, and run:
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sh <uboot-part-mount>/select-board.sh |
This will show the list of supported boards and products. Then run the command again for your device. For example:
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sudo sh <uboot-part-mount>/select-board.sh mk802 |
Finally umount the uboot and rootfs partitions. Your Fedora 18 distribution is now ready.
Insert the SD card in your device, connect your device to an HDMI monitor (except for tablets/netbooks), and power it up. It will reboot once as it will automatically resize the rootfs partition to fully utilize your SD card), and it will enter a first boot menu where you’ll be able to create users, and setup Wi-Fi.
Fedora 18 for AllWinner A1X supports most peripherals, but there’s currently no support for Mali 400 GPU, the VPU, and G2D 2D engine.
Fedora 18 should work with the following boards and products:
- Cubieboard development board
- Gooseberry development board
- Hackberry development board
- Mele a1000, a2000, a1000g and a2000g
- Mini-X
- mk802 (several models)
- mk802ii (with male normal hdmi) 1024 MB RAM
- UHost U1A HDMI TV Dongle
- Olimex A13-OLinuXino-MICRO and A13-OLinuXino
- AllWinner A10 tablets such as Coby MID7042, MID8042 and Coby MID9742 tablets, Point of View ProTab 2 tablet,
- AllWinner A13 tablets
- H6 netbook
- BA10 TV Box
This version of Fedora 18 is optimized for AllWinner A1x SoCs. So even though you could always install the stock Fedora 18 armhf on your device, this version should perform better, as it does not run all services started in the stock version, and there’s no plymouth, nor initrd.
You can also rebuild the image yourself by using sunxi-fedora-scripts.
More details are available in the README.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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