[fedora-arm] Anyone working on Mele A1000 or Allwinner A10 CPU?

[Steven A. Falco]

On 08/03/2012 06:12 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 1:00 AM, Steven A. Falco <safalco at optonline.net> wrote:
>> I've picked up a Mele A1000 set top, which uses the Allwinner A10 CPU.
>> I don't see a Fedora port for this one yet, so I might take a shot at
>> it.  But first I wanted to ask if anyone else has already started this?
>>
>> The CPU is a Cortex A8, and there is an Ubuntu port, as well as its
>> native Android OS.
> 
> None of the A10 kernel source code is upstream. It's something I would
> like to support at some point in time as there's a lot of cheap and
> interesting devices coming out with the chip from Netbook form factor
> through to stick PCs. It should be doable as it's only kernel stuff
> that's needed and it should run fine with the standard hardfp builds
> but your milarge may vary.
> 
> Peter
> 

Ok - I have Fedora 17 running on the Mele.  It is quite a hack, but it
is usable (yum merrily installing the dev tools as we speak).

Here is the recipe:

1) grab and cross-compile a copy of the kernel from:
	git://github.com/amery/linux-allwinner.git
   (use branch allwinner-v3.0-android-v2 with sun4i_defconfig)

2) grab http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma and write it
   to an SD card (don't forget to decompress it).  Afterwards, use
   gparted to expand the ext partition to fill the SD card.

3) Mount the various partitions of the SD card on a host machine.  On
   the fat partition, replace uImage with the one you just built.  On
   the ext partition, blow everything away, and replace with an untar of:
	
http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/17/Images/armhfp/Fedora-17-armhfp-console.tar.xz

4) Install the modules that go with the kernel you built to the ext
   partition (into /lib/modules/3.0.38+).

5) Stick the SD card in the Mele, and it should boot.

One big issue is that the built-in eth0 is not functional.  That is true
of the ubuntu build as well.  To get around that, I plugged in a USB/ethernet
adapter (and built the kernel module for it).  That gave me a usable eth1.

This clearly needs a ton of work to be a proper Fedora installation,
but at least it is a start...

	Steve