Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Now, the above files not only boot the Raspberry Pi but also contain some firmware to drive certain parts of the
SoC. So if the above files are corrupted or way out of date they will cause you a lot of boot issues or maybe even hang
at the Ethernet detection part of the kernel.
So now that you have a good idea what the issue may be, I will show you how to update the boot files and boot
loader on the SD card. I feel it is pretty important to have the latest boot loader and boot files. So out of habit I grab the
latest files from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's GitHub site. There are a few main files you should keep updated and
they need to be updated outside of your normal distribution's update process. You can find the GitHub site at
It's quite simple to update the files. First, shut down your Raspberry Pi and mount your SD card into your host
machine. You should see two mount points. One will be
/boot
and the other will be your root filesystem on the SD
card. Open up the
/boot
mount point and replace the following files from the latest copy on the GitHub firmware
section. You can find the latest firmware at
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot
.
The
files you need to add and update are
•
fixup.dat
•
kernel.img
•
bootcode.bin
start.elf
Overwrite all files with the versions from the GitHub site. You don't need to remove any files from the
/boot
partition; they no longer will be used during the boot process. Once you're done, eject your SD card from the host
machine and insert it back into the Raspberry Pi.
Your Raspberry Pi will now boot without error. It will then reboot itself the first time in order to resize the
filesystem on the SD card. This may take some time if you have a large SD card. Go grab a drink or some food,
and by the time you get back it should be done and waiting for your login. The bootup speed is quite quick!
•
Configure and Look Around
Now that you have a functional Raspberry Pi running Fedora, it's time to take a look around. If you have no keyboard
and screen attached, use SSH on the Raspberry Pi with
root
and
fedoraarm
as your username and password. If you
have a keyboard and mouse attached, you will find yourself in front of a series of prompts to set up the Raspberry Pi.
Because I connected over SSH, all the steps below are for the SSH install.
■
All the projects in this topic will require command-line access and I personally prefer the command line
although the choice is yours if you want to use a keyboard and monitor.
Note
Whenever I get a new piece of hardware I like to take a look around the hardware. I like to run the following
command first:
# dmesg | more
The
dmesg
command stands for display message and its main function is to print the output of the message buffer
of the kernel. In this case it should be the boot messages from the time that the power was applied to the Raspberry Pi.
It's a good idea to check over the
dmesg
for any errors or hardware that are not correctly set up by the kernel.
You may have noticed this error about not having a real-time clock (RTC) during the boot message stage:
drivers/rtc/hctosys.c: unable to open rtc device (rtc0)
