Notes for Supported FARGOS/VISTA Platforms

Sometimes certain things are obscure or advice online is either incorrect or difficult to follow. The following are a collection of notes and sample scripts used to help set up several platforms supported by FARGOS/VISTA Object Management Environments.

DE10-Nano

This very cool piece of FPGA-enabled hardware has troubles with DHCP when it comes to assigning a consistent address. The underlying issue is an extremely small amount of persistent storage and consequently the default images have the MAC address of the Ethernet adapter randomly assigned. This is very annoying when wanting to make it available as a server at a consistent address without assigning a static IP v4 address manually. There are many suggested workarounds involving attempting to save a 6-byte MAC address to the onboard EPROM, rebuilding the device table, etc.

As a simple suggestion, as the root user, create/edit the file /etc/systemd/network/00-eth0.link and assign the MAC address you desire. In the example below, this is illustrated by MAC address of AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF:

[Match]
OriginalName=*eth0

[Link]
MACAddress=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

After making the change and doing a reboot, you should see that the eth0 interface will come up with the MAC address you assigned. This MAC address can then be used with your local DHCP server to assign a consistent IP v4 address.

Raspberry Pi 3B+

The official Raspian distribution only operates the Raspberry Pi 3B+ in 32-bit mode; however, this ARM variant is actually 64-bit capable. Attempting to install Fedora Core 30 on it directly yields no success due to bugs that were introduced into the installer. You will, however, have success if you workaround that fault by attempting to install Fedora Core 29 instead. That release does yield a working system. You can then do an in-place upgrade of Fedora Core 29 to Fedora Core 30. While the entire process is extremely time-consuming, the end result will be a Fedora Core 30 image that boots successfully.

Linux S/390x on Hercules Emulator

Some scripts for installing Linux for zSeries on a hercules emulator have been made available on from the downloads page.