FatdogArm Beta4 Release Notes

FatdogArm Beta4 was released on 16 April 2016.

FatdogArm Linux is a small yet versatile operating system for ARM platform, targeted for desktop-style operations. It was originally conceived as a port from its bigger and more well-known Fatdog64 Linux: the Alpha version of FatdogArm (of which the latest version was Alpha4) is a direct port from Fatdog64, as documented here).

The beta series is a native build (on top of Alpha4). For more information on beta series, please see Beta1 Release Notes.

Beta4 changes

Beta4 is a minor release. It is mainly for updated platform support, as well as minor bug fixes.

Beta4 adds platform support for Raspberry Pi2 (raspi2) and Odroid-XU3/Odroid-XU4.

Both raspi2 and XU3/XU4 support provides working working HDMI framebuufer, sound, wifi and ethernet. There is no hardware acceleration support yet.

Raspi2 comes with kernel 4.1.17. XU4 comes with kernel 3.10.96.

All kernels are rebuilt using cross-gcc 4.8.1 compiler which is the same version and patch-level as the native compiler FatdogArm compiler. This compiler is available as an SFS package for Fatdog64 700, located here.

These platforms continue to be supported: Mele A1000 (Allwinner A10), Cubieboard2 (Allwinner A20), OLPC XO-1.75 (Marvell Armada 610), OLPC XO-4 (Marvell PXA2128), Odroid U2/U3 (Samsung Exynos 4412), and Cubox-i (both variant: i2/i4pro, Freescale i.MX6DL and i.MX6Q).

Get their kernel-packages from beta3 and you can use the latest SFS from this release.

Please refer to Beta2 Release Notes for the details of the support.

Raspi2 platform notes

Thanks to forum member "mories", FatdogArm can now support Raspi2 using its native kernel packages, or Berryboot's kernel+initrd.

Odroid-XU3/Odroid-XU4 platform notes

I have only tested this in Odroid-XU4. My understanding is since XU3 and XU4 are software-compatible, the support should also work on XU3.

The kernel is 3.10.96, which is the official hardkernel's kernel, and it comes with support for HMP that can enable all the eight (8) cores running at the same time. With this kernel, the system is capable of decoding and playing back h.264 1080p video using software decoding only.

Known problem: There is something not right in the kernel that makes "xine" crash at the end of playback. You may want to use another video playback software (ffplay, vlc) if this is a problem.

Distribution Notes

FatdogArm is distributed in two components:

The SFS packages are split into three components:

You can them from the main repository - best for US, or one if ibiblio's mirrors. There mirrors are popular:

Previous release notes: beta3 beta2 beta1 alpha4 alpha3 alpha2 alpha

(Note: Only alpha4 binaries are still available; the rest have been removed).