[fedora-arm] Fedora on ARM netbooks?

[Michel Salim]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Robert Nelson <robertcnelson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>>>
>> I have a Nokia N810 at hand (OMAP2 / ARMv6); while it's not quite what
>> Ubuntu and Nokia are targeting (9.04 and Maemo 5 targets ARMv7), it'll
>> be interesting to see how well Fedora runs on it. I'd have to get a
>> larger SDHC card, read up on how to boot the device from it (as far as
>> I remember, not that troublesome), and work out what binary blobs are
>> needed.
>
> Ubuntu is actually building 9.04 with: "-march=armv5t
> -mtune=cortex-a8" (1) so it would work on your Nokia N810 (just not
> optimal)...
>
> Nokia was sponsoring a project called Mojo-Handhelds (2) that did do
> an optimized 'armv6' version of Ubuntu 8.04, however their future is
> in question at the moment.
>
>> Having a real ARMv7 device would be much better, though. Does Nokia
>> provide those to developers, and would they lend development boards
>> (even remote access would be better than nothing) for non-Maemo use?
>
> Have you taken a look at the TI's beagleboard? 5xxMhz ARMv7 cortex-a8?
> (3)  Add a usb harddrive and usb ethernet adapter and they work great
> for development.
>
That appears to be just ideal -- though if an all-in-one notebook is
coming soon, I don't think I can justify the investment myself:

1. board = $150
2. USB serial adapter + serial cable
3. USB network card + USB hard disk (I can reuse the latter, but the
former is an added expense)

If the final product ends up under $200, setting up my own board would
double the total cost.

> I currently have one setup running 24/7 with ssh access available to
> developers, it's currently building native kernels (beagleboard,
> omap-3evm, etc) for all the debian variants i work with (debian, mojo,
> ubuntu) each in a separate chroot.
>
> I'm in the process* of adding fedora chroot's, (with an end goal of
> attempting to build an armv7 variant using the koji build system).
>
> * rootfilesystem runs native on the beagle, now just to make the chroot work...

Could I possibly get an account on yours? Are there any tasks on which
other Fedora developers can help?

Regards,

-- 
miʃel salim  •  http://hircus.jaiku.com/
IUCS         •  msalim at cs.indiana.edu
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