Configuration Hacks - Raspberry Pi Hacks - page 10

boot newer Linux kernels), you will want to make sure you are running the latest revi-
sion of the firmware.
The upstream home for the Raspberry Pi firmware is https://github.com/raspberrypi/
firmware/ . There is currently no source code available for these firmware files, so this
repository contains only binary versions. Because the Raspberry Pi is so slow (espe-
cially for Git operations), we strongly recommend that you check out these files to
your x86 laptop.
First, you need to make sure you have a Git client installed by running the following
command on Fedora:
$ yum install git
or this command on Debian/Ubuntu:
$ apt-get install git-core
Next, create a working directory for Raspberry Pi related files, such as ~/raspi :
$ mkdir ~/raspi
Go into the raspi directory:
$ cd ~/raspi
Use Git to get a local copy of the firmware files:
$ git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware.git
This will create a checkout in a new directory, named firmware . By default, this checks
out the master branch, which at the time of this writing was synced up to the version
of the firmware currently used by the Raspbian Linux kernel (3.2). If you are using a
3.2 kernel, this is the firmware you want to use. Another branch (named next ) enables
the updated drivers in the 3.6 Linux kernel. If you want to use this branch, change into
the firmware directory and enter:
$ git checkout next
To switch back to the master branch, enter:
$ git checkout master
If you want to update your firmware again later, you don't need to check out this tree
again. Simply go to the top-level checkout directory ( ~/raspi/firmware ) and enter:
$ git pull
Remember, this will pull changes for the current branch only. If you want to pull
changes for the other branch, you will need to switch to the other branch with the Git
checkout command and run git pull there as well.