Trying to learn on the Cora z7 and failing... misreably

[user32]

(apologies ahead of time, I am very frustrated)

So I have made zero progress in several weeks worth of attempts to get anything other than someone else's sd-card (image files) to boot on the Cora.

To have thought I might be able to start with something like this:

https://github.com/Digilent/Petalinux-Cora-Z7-07S

And make changes in the PL or PS and rebuild has turned out to be as discouraging as it is laughable.

I'm either failing to follow steps somehow or the project files seem to produce a number of errors in the petalinux 2023.2 env, some of which I was able to fix or hack my way around, but in the end it just wouldn't boot and I couldn't get any serial output to start debugging with. I tried running petalinux 2017 (version of the project) in a vm and spent days trying to resolve errors that mostly come from trying to run software from 2017 in recent Ubuntu vm where most of the dependencies are so old...  In searching for solutions it's a choose-you-own-adventure of

has anyone had success in deploying this project recently on a Cora board?

Are there any other resources that might help me make use of this board? 

Or is this board old now?  What board do I need to buy to be able to use the latest releases of the dev environments (vivado/petalinux) and learn how to make things happen? 

thanks for reading

[Ionel]

Hi @user32,

A a more recent version than 2017 of Petalinux project for Cora-07S can be found here:

https://github.com/Digilent/Cora-Z7-OS/tree/07S/master

Some tips if you start from scratch with newer version of petalinux:
Start with a simple hardware-desgin
After adding the hw-description(.xsa file) to your petalinux project enable fsbl debug.
Wait on serial COMx|/dev/ttyUSBx to see what is happening with the boot process
BOOT.BIN file on first fat32 partition is where the fsbl is stored and the entry point of the boot process that you can control.