How to Setup Fedora 25 Beta on a Raspberry Pi 3

November 20, 2016

Foreword

I could not find any good options to put Fedora 25 Beta on an SD card using Windows, so I used VMWare Player with a Fedora 24. This tutorial will cover all of the steps I took.

Prerequisites

You will need:

* Note: Format the SD card to FAT32

Steps

Configure VMWare Player

1. Start VMWare Player and select the option to ‘Create a New Virtual Machine’:

2. At the install prompt, select the ‘Installer disc image file (iso):’ option and click the Browse button to select the location of the Fedora 24 .iso file:

3. Give the virtual machine a name and a location to store its virtual hard drive:

4. Set the capacity of the virtual hard drive to at least 20 GB, and select the option to store the virtual disk as a single file (for performance):

5. Click the Finish button to complete the setup and begin the installation of Fedora 24 Workstation:

6. Follow the prompts on screen to complete the installation of Fedora 24:

7. After installation, shut down Fedora 24 and go back to VMWare Player to ‘Edit virtual machine settings’:

8. Select the Add button:

9. Select the Hard Disk option:

10. Select IDE:

11. Select the option to use a physical disk:

12. Select the PhysicalDrive corresponding to your SD card (generally the last one on the list):

13. Give the disk file a name:

14. Verify the capacity appears to be correct for your SD card:

Locate the SD Card

15. Boot the VM, open Terminal, switch to the root user ($ sudo su –), and run the following commands to find the SD card:
# blkid
# lsblk

Notice that the SD card is showing up as sda, with the primary partition being sda1.

Download Fedora 25 Beta

16. Open Firefox, go to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi , and download either the Workstation or Server edition of Fedora 25 Beta:

I found the Workstation edition to work okay, but I preferred Server edition for performance

Install and Use the Fedora-ARM-Installer

17. Run the following command to install the Fedora-ARM-Installer:
# dnf install -y fedora-arm-installer

18. Copy the Fedora 25 Beta image file from your user’s Downloads directory to the root user’s home directory:
# mv /home/<user>/Downloads/Fedora-Server-armhfp-25_Beta-1.1-sda.raw.xz /root/

Tip: Pressing the Tab key in Linux will autocomplete filenames for you.

19. Run the following command to start the imaging process on the SD card:
# arm-image-installer –image=Fedora-Server-armhfp-25_Beta-1.1-sda.raw.xz –target=none –media=/dev/sda

20. Type YES to proceed with the imaging:

21. Shutdown the VM, pop the SD Card into the Pi, and enjoy!

Note: This last picture is from when I loaded the Fedora 25 Beta Workstation edition.

I figured the graphical interface makes a better picture to look at than the plain terminal.