Booting Alternative OS With DeepComputing RISC-V Framework Laptop 13

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Hi folks, I’m having difficulty booting other operating systems on the 1st gen RISC-V Laptop 13 that I purchased on sale late last year. It runs the v1.1 release of Fedora 41.

My first try was with FreeBSD 16. I built u-boot artifacts with a cross-compile toolchain according to the instructions here, and then added them to the SD card image as shown here. But all I got was a blank screen. I don’t yet have a serial adapter so cannot do proper debugging, but would like to rebuild the image with other toolchains and try again.

I also tried a prebuilt image from Arvanta for Alpine Linux on VisionFive2 that also gave me a blank screen.

Wondering if anyone has prebuilt images or boot artifacts that are known working on this hardware? Any OS that is likely to be more performant than the stock GNOME environment (where I am also unable to install anything because root is locked and the DC-riscv repositories are severely limited) would be helpful. While the stock images work, the latency makes them impractical for daily use / multitasking.

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Ok, checking on the DeepComputing github turns up another possibility thanks to NixOS hardware team: nixos-hardware/starfive/visionfive/v2 at master · NixOS/nixos-hardware · GitHub

From the discussion, it sounds as though this will only work without graphic display – only serial console, but I will find out soon!

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Just wanted to mention for anyone using this 1st gen laptop, the latest official release of Ubuntu is by far the most performant and has a decent selection of packages in the repository: Releases · DC-DeepComputing/fml13v01 · GitHub

For some reason, I am currently unable to boot from eMMC but this is certainly possible and should soon result in a very usable set up!

There are also other promising collaborative releases here: https://deepcomputing.io/open-source-projects-on-risc-v/ubuntu-on-risc-v/

Solved!