[Arm-dev] First impressions Re: armv7hl for Cubies

Mon Aug 17 15:58:21 UTC 2015
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

I got the Cubietruck image from:

http://people.centos.org/hughesjr/armv7hl/cubietruck/images/cubietruck-centos-image.img.gz

I had to decompress it first before dd it to my sd card (at least I do 
not know an option for dd to process a .gz image).

So my first comment:

Can images be done with xzcat as Fedoraproject is using then it is a 
'simple'

xzcat image.xz > /dev/sdb ; sync

Image booted fine, and via serial console, I set the root password. I 
then created changed host name and created the user acct:

hostnamectl set-hostname fqdn
adduser -c "First Last" -G wheel user
passwd user

Then I went to move sshd to a port other than 22 and found that semanage 
not in the build  :(

Next I checked the system time and saw it was 0.  Need sntp or such to 
set the date/time as these boards tend NOT to have  clock batteries.

MAC address seems to be consistant across boots, but then as I recall 
F19 worked this way, it was F21 where it broke and was fixed in F22 
uboot.  This is important if you want to craft your MAC address to 
control the IPv6 address created wth RA prefixes. Particularly useful if 
you change a system and don't want to have to change your IPv6 address...

No WiFi, but none in F19.  I am months behind on Rawhide testing to see 
what Hans has working these days.

No /var/log/messages; have to figure out how to turn this on, 
particularly once I get this image to a sata HD that Cubie supports.  
Along with logrotate.

No Apache to test out web access.  In fact no yum repos, but I think 
that is what the earlier messages said, and perhaps no progress in this 
direction.

https://github.com/mndar/rbf talks about based on F21.  I would like to 
see that image, as well as the Cubie2 image mentioned.  I do not have 
any worthwhile experience with github to quickly navigate around  (

So other than saying I got C7 up on my Cubietruck, I will need to find a 
lot more before I can take the next step.

but thanks for what is available so far.


On 08/17/2015 08:04 AM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>
>
> On 08/17/2015 06:01 AM, Mandar Joshi wrote:
>>> I would like to be able to block out a few hours a
>>> week working on Centos armv7 on either a cubie2 or cubietruck.
>>>
>> Johnny Hughes has built and released an image for the cubietruck build
>> using RootFS Build Factory. You can read the blog post here
>> http://seven.centos.org/2015/06/centos-7-1503-armv7hl-proof-of-concept-pre-alpha-image-available-for-the-cubietruck/ 
>>
>> This image does not have the root password set, so you will need a
>> HDMI cable or a serial console cable.
>
> All my Cubies have the serial console cable to USB.  I feel that is as 
> much a 'standard' config as VGA/Kybd was on Intel boards. And it only 
> adds $1.75 per unit.
>
>> You can generate an image yourself for your cubietruck with the root
>> password set using the latest RootFS Build Factory
>> https://github.com/mndar/rbf
>>
>> David Tischler has tested the image built for Cubieboard 2. So you can
>> give that a shot too.
>>
>> For RBF, the README on github has everything to get you started. There
>> are additional docs in the doc directory if you wish to add support
>> for more boards.
>
> Thanks I will allocate a bit of time for this.  Probably more tomorrow 
> than today, it seems.
>
>