Google Mendel Linux for Nitrogen8M boards - (kernel 4.14.x)

  1. Why another distribution?
    1. Programming the image
    2. What was modified/added
    3. Coral Edge TPU mini-PCIe card
    4. Connect to the board's shell via MDT
Nitrogen8M SBCNitrogen8M SOM

Mendel Weston desktop Mendel Linux is a lightweight derivative of Debian Buster Linux that originally runs on a number of Coral development boards. Now we ported it to Nitrogen8MQ board.

Why another distribution?

To support Coral‘s hardware, Google wanted to build a version of Debian that produced initial bootable eMMC images and supported their specific peripherals. Ideally, they’d have liked to use the Debian name, but that wasn't feasable for a host of reasons.Suffice it to say, Mendel is considered to be a lightweight “derivative” of the upstream Debian Buster distribution, and they even use upstream Debian's binary packages in the project to maintain compatibility and keep up to date with security fixes.If you want to know what's changed in Mendel, see Google's release notes.Mendel uses Weston, the reference Wayland compositor as graphical desktop.This system contains NXP/Freescale licensed content, so you will need to register on our web-site and log in before you can accept the license agreement and download the images from here:Nitrogen8M board:

Important !Before installing this image please check your U-Boot version as it requires U-Boot version 2018.07  to be used.Make sure to visit our wiki if you need to upgrade:

You can find the bootscript in the /boot subdirectory now, its named boot.scr. The partition labels are set if you use the fastboot method.If you use your own method please check the boot partition labels, because the fstab boots by label (LABEL=sys-0Ch for example) now. You can use e2label to modify partition label.

Programming the image

Since the Nitrogen8M board has no SD card slot, you need to program this image in the same way as an Android  system: by using fastboot.Please install the following packages on your desktop PC, Debian or Ubuntu :

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install fastboot android-tools-fastboot
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