Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft), Author at CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

January 18, 2012January 18, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 25 Comments

Cross-compiling libavg 1.7 for ARM on Debian

libavg is a high-level development platform for media-centric applications using Python as scripting language and written in C++ and I’ve already written a post to cross-compile libavg 1.6 in Ubuntu (with linaro cross toolchain) and using Beagleboard qemu image. Since I’ve doing some preparation work to have software running on the Raspberry Pi and that the latter won’t support Ubuntu, I’ve had to cross-compile it again. This time, I’ve found a cleaner way to do the cross-compilation with dpkg-cross and xapt tools which can load the required armel package to the arm toolchain. Those tools really make life easy, as previously (a few years ago), I would have had to cross-compile all dependencies manually. Here are the steps I followed: Install Emdebian ARM Cross Toolchain and Tools in Debian. Download libavg 1.7 source code

wget http://www.libavg.de/raw-attachment/wiki/DownLoad/libavg-1.7.0.tar.gz

1	wget http://www.libavg.de/raw-attachment/wiki/DownLoad/libavg-1.7.0.tar.gz

Extract it

tar xzvf libavg-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd libavg-1.7.0

1 2	tar xzvf libavg-1.7.0.tar.gz cd libavg-1.7.0

Install the following armel development packages: sudo /usr/share/pdebuild-cross/xapt -a armel libpango1.0-dev libavformat-dev […]

January 18, 2012January 18, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Android and Tizen on Intel Medfield Atom Z2460 (Video Interview)

Intel announced the MedField Soc (Atom Z2460) targeted at smartphones and tablet and showcased a smartphone reference design running Android based on this platform. Mike Bell GM of Intel’s Mobile Communications Groups (MCG) has been interviewed by EETimes. He talks about Intel entry into the mobile phone market and explains that MedField boasts similar power consumption than top competitors with better performance (3 to 4 times faster in some web browser benchmark). He mainly talks on what they have done to port Android on the platform (and shows Angry Bird a lot) and what you may expect in the future. He also quickly mentioned Tizen. Here’s the original EETimes’ article. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

January 17, 2012June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Samsung Merges Bada OS With Tizen

Samsung has announced that it was merging Bada operating system with the new Tizen project (Linux OS with HTML5 API) at CES 2012. The work has already started, but Samsung did not provide any estimated completion date. If you have been developing Bada applications, the good news is that Tizen will support mobile applications written with bada’s SDK (software development kit) and previously published bada apps will be backwards compatible. Bada and Tizen developers will be given the same software tools (SDKs and APIs) so that if you know how to program in Bada, you will also be able to make Tizen apps. Samsung expects Tizen will be used in entry-level smartphone powered by single core processors as well as other devices targeted by Tizen such as tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and In-vehicle infotainment (IVI) devices. One or two Tizen devices should be released in 2012, and the company said […]

January 16, 2012May 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Resize a VirtualBox VDI Image in Windows XP/7

I had a VDI image set to 8GB that was nearly full and re-sized it to 16 GB with the following command: “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe” modifyhd “C:\Documents and Settings\Jean-Luc\VirtualBox VMs\Debian 6.0.3\Debian 6.0.3.vdi” –resize 16384 16384 is the new virtual harddisk size in MB (16 GB). This will increase the size of the Virtual disk. However, it won’t increase the size of the partition in your virtual disk. You have then 2 solutions: Create a new partition with the extra free space Use Gparted Live ISO image to increase the size of your current partition. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

January 16, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Ubuntu TV Works on OMAP4 Pandaboard

Ricardo Salveti, Software Engineer at Canonical, has written a blog post saying that Ubuntu TV now support full video hardware acceleration on the Pandaboard, TI OMAP 4 low cost development board. A demo of Ubuntu TV on the ARM platform with Ubuntu TV UI and 720p/1080p video playback can be seen in the video below. Pandaboard is the first ARM platform that can fully run Ubuntu TV. If you have a Pandaboard, you can try it out by installing the packages available at Linaro’s Overlay PPA. Qt and Qtmobility are not there yet (Patches are available at https://github.com/robclark/qtmobility-1.1.0), but he said they would be soon. The source code for Ubuntu TV is available at https://code.launchpad.net/~s-team/ubuntutv/trunk Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. […]

January 16, 2012April 19, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Installing Emdebian ARM Cross Toolchain in Debian

I had previously installed Sourcery G++ ARM Linux toolchain in Ubuntu to build some software running in Debian, but I encountered some issues with some libraries (libavg) that use gethostbyname in static libraries without any easy way to make it dynamic. In that case, the library in the rootfs and cross-compiler must match. So I decided to install Debian Squeeze (6.0.3) and the corresponding cross-toolchain by Emdebian (short for Embedded Debian). First to use this toolchain, add the URL to get Emdebian packages to /etc/apt/sources.list: # # — Emdebian cross toolchains # deb http://www.emdebian.org/debian/ squeeze main Then install Emdebian public key: apt-get install emdebian-archive-keyring apt-get update If you don’t install the key, you’ll get the following error: W: GPG error: http://www.emdebian.org squeeze Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY B5B7720097BB3B58 Search and install packages for the architecture that you need, in this […]

January 14, 2012January 14, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Geniatech ATV510 Android 4.0 Media Player

Geniatech showcased the TV Box Nano2 ATV510 at CES 2012. This media player is powered by an AMLogic single core Cortex A9 processor (possibly Amlogic AML8726-M) with 512 MB RAM, 2GB Flash and featuring 2 USB ports, 1 microSD slot, a 10/100M Ethernet port and built-in Wifi. The remote, named AiRemote, is an RF remote with accelerometer and gyrometer. The device runs Android 4.0.1, and the company plans to port Google TV 2.0 to their media player soon. This STB should available in Europe and the US in March 2012 at an undisclosed price. Geniatech page for the ATV510 (http://www.geniatech.com/pa/atv510.asp) is currently not working, but you can have a look at the ATV500 running Android 2.3 to get details about the previous model. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, […]

January 14, 2012January 14, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Texas Instruments OMAP 5 Reference Design

Texas Instruments announced it was developing the OMAP 5, the first Cortex A15 processor, in February 2012. This year at CES 2012, Texas Instruments unveiled OMAP 5-based reference design / development platform running Android 4.0.1 to Engadget. Remi El-Ouazzane, VP of OMAP at Texas Instruments, explains: “This is the greatest platform on Earth right now… way ahead of Apple, and it’s the first Cortex-A15 (which runs 2x faster than the Cortex-A9) product on the market. When running two Cortex-A15 chips at 800MHz, it’s more or less the same performance as running two Cortex-A9s at 1.5GHz. You’ll see [commercially available products] ramping up with this stuff in late 2012 or early 2013. We are also running Windows 8 on the latest OMAP; it runs perfectly well, and we’ve been working very closely with Microsoft. We’re working on multiple form factors — tablets, thin-and-lights — and we think ARM is going to […]