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Trimslice

The Trimslice is one of the most powerful ARM devices available and features a variety of connectivity options. At this time there is no support for a display and the Trimslice boots to a serial console.

Technical Specifications

  • 1 GHz NVIDA Tegra 2 (dual-core ARM Cortex A9)
  • 1 GB DDR2-667 RAM
  • HDMI 1.3 max resolution 1920 x 1080
  • Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8111DL)
  • 802.11 b/g/n WiFi

For more information on the Trimslice visit their website.

Running Fedora on a Trimslice

This page will give you detailed instructions for running Fedora 18 Alpha on your Trimslice. The image is prepared to boot from SD card by default, but can be easily modified to boot from the internal SATA connection (USB) by using the appropriate boot script (boot.scr.usb).

Download the image

The first step is to download the Fedora 18 Alpha image. The prebuilt image includes everything you will need and can be written directly to SD Card, USB, or SATA drive.

Writing the Image

Linux Users

You can write the image to media of your choosing but it does have to meet the minimum size requirement of 4GB. Connect the media to your computer and make note of the drive. To write the image to your media run the following command, changing the drive to the location of your media.

For the SD Image:
xzcat Fedora-18-Alpha-armhfp-trimslice.img.xz > /dev/<location-of-your-SD-card>

Once completed run the below command to ensure the entire image is written to the device:

sync
For the SATA/USB Image:
xzcat Fedora-18-Alpha-armhfp-trimslice.img.xz > /dev/<location-of-your-SATA/USB>

Then mount the 'boot' partition and copy the appropriate boot script to boot.scr:

 cp boot.scr.usb boot.scr

Once completed run the below command to ensure the entire image is written to the device:

sync

Windows Users

  • You will need to download Win32 Image Writer as well as a tool to extract the image such as 7-Zip.
  • Once downloaded and installed right click on the disk image and select "7-Zip->Extract files here"
  • Launch Win 32 Disk Imager and select the extracted disk image and the device you would like to write the files to. Click "Write". Be very careful during this step - all data on the selected drive will be lost!

Mac Users

  • Please note that the Default Archive Utility.app will not extract the .xz file. A third party app will have to be used to decompress it. There are multiple options for that
    1. There is a Free App available in the App Store called Unarchiver.
    2. If mac homebrew or macport is already installed, then the xz utility can be downloaded and installed using one of those.
    3. The xz utils .pkg for mac can be downloaded and installed directly from xz utils
  • Once the xz utility is installed, open a terminal and make a note of the current drives.
ls /dev/disk?
  • Connect the SD card to the mac and make a note of the drive.
  • Open Disk Utility and make sure that the card and all the partitions in the card (if any) is unmounted
  • In the terminal change to the directory where the .xz file is located
  • If xz was installed from the .pkg or macport or homebrew then run the following command
xzcat Fedora-17-armhfp-trimslice-mmcblk0.img.xz > /dev/<location-of-the-SD-card>
  • If the Unarchiver app from App Store was used then just click and decompress the .xz file and then run the following (may require sudo)
dd if=Fedora-17-armhfp-trimslice-mmcblk0.img.xz of=/dev/<location-of-the-SD-card>
  • Click and eject the SD card

Using Fedora on the Trimslice

Connect the newly created media to your Trimslice and power on. No further steps are required and your system should boot to a serial console log in prompt. If you do not have a serial cable to connect your Trimslice, you can watch your DHCP server for the newly connected device. After a few minutes you should be able to see the host "fedora-arm'. Use SSH to connect to the root account.

ssh root@fedora-arm (or IP)

The default root password is "fedoraarm". This should be changed immediately.

Known Issues

  • Yum requires the system time be correct for HTTPS to function. If yum updates are not working check your clock.
  • The tar.xz rootfs archives do not preserve SELinux information or file capabilities. If you use these to create your own filesystem image it is recommended that you switch SELinux to use warnings instead of enforcing for first boot, then relabel and reinstall packages that rely upon filesystem capabilities such as glibc-common and ping.
  • Images are designed to be written to a minimum of 2GB SD cards, SATA Disks, and SSD drives. On first boot the partition will be resized to the maximum allowable amount. On the second boot the filesystem will be resized to fill the expanded partition. This works for SD cards, SATA Disks, and SSD drives.
  • Known release issues

Additional Support

There are Fedora ARM users all around the globe - if you need assistance, would like to provide feedback or contribute to Fedora ARM please visit us on the IRC - we can be found in #fedora-arm on Freenode. You can also contact us on the mailing list - arm@lists.fedoraproject.org