New Fedlet release, 20141111, a tip for KMS on the Venue 8 Pro, and dealing with Fedlet 'updating' to Fedora 22

I cut a new Fedlet release today, 20141111. You can get it from the Fedlet page.

The big improvement is working internal wifi on the Venue 8 Pro - many thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer for that. It has kernel 3.18rc4, which may possibly help other devices out, I don't know. It bumps the userland to ~Fedora 21 Final TC1 or so.

I figured out a way to make KMS graphics work on my Venue 8 Pro, too. For me, it works when I boot through the boot device menu (hold down volume up on boot). When I boot that way, early boot happens in a low resolution, then when KMS kicks in, it switches to native resolution. When I boot through the firmware UI, or just normally, early boot happens in native resolution, and KMS activation blanks the screen.

For me, graphics are extremely slow and wifi doesn't work after a reboot - the workaround is to power off fully and power back on, not just reboot.

If you have an earlier version of Fedlet installed, you may have wound up getting Rawhide - Fedora 22 - packages installed, instead of tracking Fedora 21. This is to do with Fedlet being a non-official build of Fedora - I didn't bother making a 'fedlet-release' package, I just use the 'generic-release' package that's shipped in Fedora, but it doesn't get updated very quickly and it wound up pulling in Rawhide repositories when it shouldn't have.

To fix it up, you basically need to get up to at least generic-release-21-7 from the F21 repo, and install a 'Product' subpackage - generic-release-workstation or generic-release-nonproduct are the obvious choices. Remove generic-release-rawhide. Then you can run yum --releasever 21 distro-sync, which should pull everything back into line with Fedora 21.

The new release has the current generic-release, so it shouldn't have this problem. I forgot to explicitly pull in a Product sub-package, though, so it got generic-release-cloud, which is silly but shouldn't have any particular consequences. I'll clean it up in the next release.

Comments

AGui wrote on 2014-11-12 14:03:
Thanks Adam and Jan-Michael. I was finally able to boot Fedlet on my Dell Venue 11 Pro ! I used OpenSUSE's ImageWriter to load the image on a USB key, but strangely, if I choose "Test this media & start Fedlet", the integrity fails at 4.8%. However, if I start directly, it boots fine... Touchscreen and Wifi are working perfectly (I'm writing on Fedlet right now), sound works after following the instructions on Fedlet's home page, and the keyboard (including luminosity and search keys) is working. The touchpad isn't still great to use, as you can't click with the button and drag at the same time, but it is functional enough. As for what still doesn't work, I don't have any battery status (there are two batteres on the Venue 11 Pro) and screen rotation in tablet mode doesn't work. If I can be of any help to solve any of these problems, please let me know. Thanks again for your work, it is really appreciated.
adamw wrote on 2014-11-12 15:44:
Glad it's working! The bug for battery status is https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69011 - if you can add a note there that the current patch (you'll see some comments from me, mention that you're using the same patch I refer to) doesn't work on your Venue 11 Pro and add any of the information that was requested from other reporters, that'd probably help Lan out. Jan says rotation on the Venue 8 Pro works with https://github.com/pfps/yoga-laptop/tree/master/sensors - "compile with make, start ./setup and then ./orientation. Screen will automatically rotate". I haven't tested it yet, and I don't know if the V11P is wired the same way. I'll probably look into it a bit more when I get back from vacation.