How to install Fedora 26 on the Raspberry Pi (Headless and Wireless)

The Raspberry Pi is the most famous SBC (Single-Board Computer). It is a recent news that over five millions of units were sold since it came out.

There are a lot of Linux-based and not Linux-based operating systems that runs on the Raspberry: Fedora is one of the latest landed in this platform. Due to this fact, many things still don’t work: for instance, according to what you can read on the Fedora wiki, expansion HATs, composite TV out, analog sound port and the add-on camera are not yet supported; support for displays other than the official one is not currently planned, GPIO isn't well supported. In addition Fedora supports only Pi version 2 and later.
Obviously the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends the use of Raspbian, a Debian-based Linux operating system. And as stated before, there are many distributions that have been around for a long time, therefore they probably work better on such platform. Compared to the rest of the world Fedora on ARM could look at early stages of development.
Then, due to these facts the question could be: why using Fedora on the Raspberry Pi when there are more feature rich and widely used distributions? The answer is: isn’t Fedora our favorite distro? So let’s give a try to the ARM version.
Side note: ARM is an architecture officially supported by Fedora.

Let’s get started.

Preparing the SD card

The installation of the Fedora ARM image on an SD card is simple as these two steps:

- download the raw image of your choice (in this case Minimal) from https://arm.fedoraproject.org/

- run this command (supposing you are running Fedora on your PC and that you have installed the fedora-arm-installer package via DNF)

sudo arm-image-installer --image=Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-26-1.5-sda.raw.xz --target=rpi3 --norootpass --resizefs --media=/dev/mmcblk0 -y

Please refer to the Fedora wiki.

Such command will blanks the root password (remember to subsequently set one during first setup) and it will automatically resize the root partition in order to fill up the SD card size.

Once done, remove the SD card from your PC.

The serial console

If you do not have an HDMI screen to connect to the Raspberry Pi, or if you want to run a completely headless box, you have to enable the serial console.

The task is different between the Raspberry 2 and 3. These steps are for the version 3:

- insert the SD card in your PC, it should automatically mount three partitions

- edit the file extlinux.conf

sudo vim /run/media/youruser/__boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

add "console=tty0 console=ttyAMA0,115200" to the end of the append line

append ro root=UUID=<uuid-uuid> console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200

- edit the config.txt file in the root partiton

sudo vim /run/media/youruser/sometinglike-4AC9-BABE/config.txt
uncomment the enable_uart line:

enable_uart=1

The onboard wifi adapter

If you want to enable the onboard WiFi adapter, you have to download a file that Fedora can not currently redistribute in the raw image:

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/master/brcm80211/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt -o /run/media/youruser/__/lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt
 

Booting the Raspberry

Umount the three partitions, using something like

umount /run/media/youruser/__boot ; umount /run/media/youruser/__ ; umount /run/media/youruser/sometinglike-4AC9-BABE

Then insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi, connect an Usb to Serial/TTL Adapter (the pin 8 on the Raspberry is the TX and pin 10 is the RX). Then power up the device.

You can look at the boot process using a terminal emulator program like minicom or GTKterm, or even the simple screen command:

screen  /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Once the boot process will reach the end, you should see the Fedora initial setup where you can create an account, set the root password, configure the timezone, etc.

As soon as you log in, if the Raspberry is connected to the network using the Ethernet interface, and there is a DHCP server in the LAN, you are almost done. Check if you are really online and perform a system update:

sudo dnf update

Setup the wifi

If for some reason you can’t use the Ethernet interface and you need to connect to the WiFi network, you have to configure the wireless interface using the Network Manager command line interface (nmcli).

For instance, if your network uses WPA or WPA2, and there is a DHCP this task is pretty simple:

nmcli radio

nmcli device wifi connect YOURSSID password secretpassword

If you need to set up a static IP there are instead various steps to perform:

Add a connection profile and set the IP/netmask and the default gateway

nmcli con add con-name ConnectionName ifname wlan0 type wifi ssid YOURSSID ip4 192.168.100.200/24 gw4 192.168.100.1

Set up the DNS

nmcli con modify ConnectionName ipv4.dns "8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4"

Configure the wireless security (in this case wpa-psk) and the password

nmcli con modify ConnectionName wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-psk

nmcli con modify ConnectionName wifi-sec.psk verysecurepassword

Now you can bring up the connection:

nmcli con up ConnectionName

Conclusion

Here we have an headless and wireless Raspberry Pi 3 running our favorite GNU/Linux distribution!

Please refer to the Fedora Project wiki for more and up to date informations:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi