I had previously written the instructions to build an older version of Chromium (via Berkelium) for ARM using Beagleboard/Overo rootfs in order to use it with Xibo digital signage. Recently I’ve been contacted by hexxeh, who maintains Chromium OS vanilla builds for x86 and MacOS computer, as he intends to provide Chromium OS for the Raspberry Pi, and you should be able to get a SD card image once everything is working from the site above. Today, I’ll post the steps followed to build Chromium OS LKGR (“the latest revision to pass only unit tests”) optimized for ARMv6 processor with soft-float support, which is the type of processor (Broadcom BCM2835) used in the Raspberry Pi. Please note that although it can build, it still does not run properly and a few more changes are needed. First, you’ll need a fast machine to build Chromium OS in a reasonable amount of […]
Second Release of Debian 6 for Raspberry Pi
As Raspberry Pi boards have started to ship this week, the Raspberry Pi foundation has also posted a new Debian 6.0 “squeeze” release to the downloads section of raspberrypi.org this week-end. This release contains several performance enhancements, including enabling the 128K system L2 cache for the first time, and first-cut ALSA drivers. Enabling the L2 cache will boost the ARM CPU performance, however, it may decrease the GPU performance. So this setup is ideal for headless server, but for other applications, for example a media player decoding 1080p30 videos, the performance might actually go down. This is still customizable, as the L2 cache can be enabled / disabled with enable_l2cache parameter in the config.txt file stored on the SD card. The ALSA drivers are here for audio support, so audio output might not have been supported in the first release (TBC), except if they used another type of audio drivers […]
Qt 5 for Raspberry Pi (QtonPi) 0.1 Release
Nokia Qt Labs has announced the very first release of Qt5 for Raspberry: QtonPi 0.1. QtonPi 0.1 includes a pre-alpha release of Qt 5, but Qt 5 alpha will be part of the next release. So bear in mind that it’s likely to be buggy and some features are missing. This release is includes: Base Layer Fedora RPM Packages plus some additional Raspberry Pi specific packages Linaro GCC 4.5.4 toolchain QtonPi image creator and sysroot tools Middleware Documentation on how to get toolchain + sysroot + Qt Creator working to Develop Apps Qt 5 running on full-screen EGFS mode The release can be downloaded via: BitTorrent – qtonpi-0.01.tar.bz2.torrent HTTP Download – qtonpi-0.01.tar.bz2 Alternatively if you are already running the Debian 6 image in the emulator or Raspberry Pi board, you can install the latest snapshot (e.g. nightly build) by adding deb http://archive.qmh-project.org/rpi/debian/ unstable main to /etc/apt/sources.list and run the following […]
98 Raspberry Pi Boards Left for Qt Developers
In November 2011, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced that Nokia purchased codes for 400 boards from the 1st 10,000 batch, in order to give them away to selected developers that are interested in helping develop and test Qt 5 on the Raspberry Pi. This developer program is called QtonPi. The surprising part if that they struggle to distribute all those boards. Although to date 425 people have been selected, only 302 are currently eligible to receive a board because over 100 developers did not provide their details to receive the free Raspberry Pi board namely: Their full name The link to their wiki user profile. The area of the “QtonPi Accepted Page” where they are listed. The country where the board will be shipped If by chance, you are reading this blog, have been selected but you can’t see “OK” or “CODE SENT” next to your user ID, you should […]
Cross-compiling FreeRDP Windows Remote Desktop Client for ARM Linux (in Debian/Ubuntu)
Last month, I wrote the instructions to Cross-compile VMWare View for ARM Linux as I intended to “run” Windows 8 in an ARM client (most likely the Raspberry Pi) via PCoIP. However, the procedure to do so seems slightly complicated and requires to purchase a specific VMWare server software (VMware vSphere 5) or download a free trial. The good news is that there are other options such as VNC or RDP (Remote Desktop protocol) and Remmina, a Remote Connection client is available for Linux. As nothing is ever simple, another issue occured: if you are using a stable release of Linux (e.g. Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu 11.10) they come with older version of Remmina and either the connection is successful but the display is garbled (Version 0.7.x) either it crashes when connecting to Windows 8 via RDP (Version 0.8.x). The latest version (Remmina 1.0.0) fixes the problem and is available in […]
Instructions to Run Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix in QEMU
As mentioned in my previous post, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Fedora 14 Remix SD card image that can be installed either via installer (easiest method) or using dd / windd as with the previous image. In this blog post, I’ll give the instructions how to run Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix in QEMU using a similar method than the one I used for Debian Squeeze. I tested since in machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian 6.0.4. Download the image using BitTorrent raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz.torrent or via the HTTP link available on Raspberry Pi Download page. Decompress the image:
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gzip -d raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz |
Download kernel 3.0.4 image for qemu, if you don’t have it yet.
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wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/45842273/zImage |
Since the rootfs is full (in the real board it will be resized to the size of the SD Card), we need to increase the size of the rootfs partition. First create and empty 3G […]
Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix Available for Download
Seneca has officially released Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix, the main distributions for the Raspberry Pi low cost ARM11 board based on Broadcom BCM2835. There are two methods to install Fedora 14 for the Raspberry Pi on the SD Card: Using the Installer This method is available for: Fedora 16 – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/fedora/fedora-arm-installer-1.0.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm Windows Vista or Windows 7 – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/windows/fedora-arm-installer-1.0.0.zip Other Linux (Python) – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/source/faii-1.0.0.tar.gz For details on the installation procedure, go to http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Raspberry_Pi_Fedora_Remix_Installation Using dd This is the method used for the previous Linux images released for the Raspberry Pi. You can download it via Bittorrent. The HTTP download links are not yet available but will be soon on Raspberry Pi Download page. The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix 14 is based on the following: Fedora package collection version: 14 Kernel version: 3.1.9 Architecture: armv5tel The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix 17 will be the second version of the Remix released: Release […]
Raspberry Pi Releases Arch Linux SD Card Image
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the release of Arch Linux for the Raspberry Pi. This image is based on a minimal image of Arch Linux and does not come with a graphical interface. This distribution may not be suitable for beginners and you may be better off using the Debian SD Card image or even the upcoming Fedora 14 Raspberry Pi Remix image. You can always install extra packages with Pacman, the Arch Linux package manager. To update the package list:
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pacman -Syu |
To Install LXDE Graphical Interface:
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pacman -S lxde xorg-xinit xf86-video-fbdev |
To run LXDE:
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xinit /usr/bin/lxsession |
You can download it using BitTorrent: archlinuxarm-01-03-2012.zip.torrent (preferred method) or via one of the HTTP mirrors: archlinuxarm-01-03-2012.zip. (This link will redirect your download to the closest available HTTP server). The default login credentials are: root/root I haven’t tried it, but you should be able to use this release in qemu, by following instructions similar to the one […]