After all the Pi excitement, back to (relative) normality.. I upgraded my main (x86_64) systems to Fedora 17, using YUM, as usual.. I have found that using the DVD is messy, and sometimes leaves the system in a ‘hybrid’ state, and then the DVD versions of many packages need to be updated, in any case! Compared to … Continue reading →
Despite previous ‘tweaks’, I have been experiencing continuing problems with SD Card Linux performance, and with the unreliable operations of yum / rpm, with associated db corruption, when they have to be ‘killed’ after hanging.. Based on two excellent pieces of prior research: http://blogofterje.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/optimizing-fs-on-sd-card/ and http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/projects-and-collaboration-general/optimizing-linux-for-flash-memory – I will be having a stimulating (!) time performing formatting … Continue reading →
Raspberry Pi finally arrived today.. Set up with Fedora ‘Respin’ FC14.. Initial impressions.. Confirmed what we already know – does _not_ support Class 10 SD Cards! Had to do a quick install onto an old 2GB Class 4 card (not really big enough!**)… 32GB Class 4 card on order.. First boot – prompts for user name … Continue reading →
Kernel 3.4rc1 is out, and appears to be the new ‘mainline’ version, according to the website at www.kernel.org.. 3.3 is not even mentioned, any more..! I just updated two of my systems (x86_64) to 3.4rc1, and everything seemed to be working just fine (see Update below..).. There are already fixes available for VMware and NVIDIA to work … Continue reading →
Shades of the late-’90s and early-’00s again… I decided I needed a reliable and practical backup for my systems, and having an array of n-TB disks seemed complete overkill (and _expensive_).. So, I’m getting a reasonably-priced HP Ultrium 960 LTO-3 external drive, which is relatively expensive (£450), but the tapes (400GB / 800GB ‘compressed’) are not – … Continue reading →
I have been having continuing problems with yum ‘hanging’ on my Dreamplug – through several different versions of Fedora, and numerous kernel updates (currently FC17 and Kernel 3.3..) The Fedora rootfs image did not include any swap, so – after some digging around – I decided to add a ./SWAP file, and activate it… The results (so … Continue reading →
This is how I compile ARM kernels. There are other ways of doing this, but this works, for me.. First – I should mention – Read the Wicki! This is at http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Hub After getting the ‘forked’ kernel I then had to obtain a suitable config file, which included the necessary extra items for the Pi Broadcom chipset.. … Continue reading →
The Fedora armv5tel / x86_64 cross-compiler toolchain is a bit ancient (GCC 4.1.2!), and the Pi is armv6.. So.. I needed a more up-to-date and architecture-friendly substitute.. After some abortive attempts (some of the other armv7 cross-compilers were just as old!) I found a set of armv7 / x86_64 cross-compiler rpms – including gcc version 4.6.1 – … Continue reading →
Tried the Fedora 17 Alpha release on a crash-and-burn x86_64 system… Definitely alpha quality… Biggest show-stopper was the weird behaviour of grub2 and dracut, which meant that only one of the kernel choices in the grub2 menu booted OK, but others got ‘lost’ and threw all sorts of worrying udev and ‘xxx not found’ messages, before hanging … Continue reading →