Category: Linux

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments on Smallart U-Host mini PC Unboxing and Review

Smallart U-Host mini PC Unboxing and Review

I’ve just received a Smallart Uhost mini PC based on AllWinner A10 from the “The Cubies hacker shop” on Aliexpress. The device features 1GB RAM, 4B flash, includes 802.11 b/g/n built-in, USB ports, HDMI output and a microSD card. It costs $70 including shipping. I received the device in the simple package below. There is a whole bunch of stuffs inside the package. A USB to mini USB cable for power and to connect the device to PC to act as a USB drive, the Smallart U-host mini PC itself, a user manual in English, the power supply 5V/2A with a USB port, an HDMI female to male cable. The USB to mini USB cable has actually 2 large USB connector in order to provide up to 5W power (2  x 500mA x 5V). The mini PC has several connectors including an HDMI male connector, a USB Host port (for […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.07 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4. Some work has been done on Jelly Bean (but the port is for next month), several benchmark tools have been added to LAVA as Linaro wants to provide standard benchmarks for Android, Linaro ALIP image now uses LXDE by default with a smaller image and improved performance, and Open Embedded images are now available (minimal and LAMP stack). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated Open overlay tarballs working pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds Linaro […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on VIA Releases Kernel 2.6.32 and U-Boot Source Code for $49 APC Board

VIA Releases Kernel 2.6.32 and U-Boot Source Code for $49 APC Board

VIA Technology unveiled the low cost APC (Android PC) board based on WonderMedia WM8750 processor (ARM11) back in May, and started to ship the Android board this month (I think since that was their plan). The company has just released Kernel 2.6.32.9 and U-Boot source on github. Here’s how to retrieve the code provided git is already installed on your machine:

You can then build U-Boot (provided you’ve already installed an ARM toolchain in your path):

and the Linux kernel:

The availability of the source means we should see Linux distribution like Debian, Fedora or Arch Linux ARM (separate from Arch Linux) running on the board very soon. In theory, it’s also possible to run a Linux distribution with the binary Linux kernel compiled for Android, but it causes some issues and also makes customization more difficult. I think they should also have release the code they modified […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments on Stella Mira Pocket Console AllWinner A10 mini PC with Built-in Bluetooth and Up to 128 GB Flash

Stella Mira Pocket Console AllWinner A10 mini PC with Built-in Bluetooth and Up to 128 GB Flash

Stella Mira, a new technology startup, has come up with a new Android mini-PC based on AllWinner A10 (how original!) called the Pocket Console (aka MiraPC). What makes it stand apart is that it comes with built-in Bluetooth, has several versions based on the NAND flash size: 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64 GB and even 128 GB, and the company plans to release a 3G version in September. The company also provides a dock, the Stella Mira Pocket Dock, that comes pre-loaded with one of supported Linux distributions, without the requiring the knowledge and time to configure microSD card for Linux. The company will provide 4 Linux distributions: Ubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Ready) Lubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Ready) Xubuntu 12.04 (Custom build – Final stage of development) Fedora 17 XFCE (Not officially supported, but backed by a large development community) Beside running Linux, the Pocket Console can also “run […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments on VIA Announces VIA VAB-800 Pico-ITX Board Based on Freescale i.MX537 Processor

VIA Announces VIA VAB-800 Pico-ITX Board Based on Freescale i.MX537 Processor

VIA Technologies has announced the VIA VAB-800 Pico-ITX board powered by a Freescale i.MX537 (ARM Cortex A8) processor clocked at 800MHz or 1GHz depending on the requirements, with 1GB DDR3-800 SDRAM and support for eMMC Flash with a capacity of up to 64 GB. The VIA VAB-800 is an industrial board that can operate in a wide temperature range and targets high-end industrial and in-vehicle embedded applications. Here are the specs of the board: Processor – Freescale Cortex-A8 single core iMX537 @800MHz System Memory – 1GB DDR3-800 SDRAM, using 128M x16 memory devices Flash – eMMC Flash, up to 64GB Graphics  – Supports two independent, integrated graphics processing units: an OpenGL® ES 2.0,  3D graphics accelerator and an OpenVG™ 1.1 2D graphics accelerator Ethernet – SMSC LAN8720A 10/100 PHY transceiver with HP Auto-MDIX support Audio – Freescale SGTL5000 low power stereo codec with headphone amp HDMI – Silicon image SiI9024A […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on 24 Euros Aria G25 Atmel SAM9 (ARM9) Linux Embedded Module

24 Euros Aria G25 Atmel SAM9 (ARM9) Linux Embedded Module

ACME System, an Italian company specializing in low-cost microprocessor boards, has designed the Aria G25, a tiny system-on-module (SoM) based on Atmel SAM9G25  for Linux embedded devices, that will be available in August and sell for 24 Euros (128 MB RAM version) and 29 Euros (256 MB RAM). Here are Aria G25 specifications: CPU – Atmel AT91SAM9G25 (ARM9) @ 400Mhz CPU System Memory – 128MB (G25-128) or 256MB (G25-256) DDR2 RAM Connectivity – 10/100 Mbit Ethernet interface USB – Up to 3 USB 2.0 host ports (2 Hi-Speed, 1 Full-Speed) Interfaces: Up to 6 serial lines 2x I2C buses 2x SPI buses 60 GPIO lines 4x A/D lines @ 10 bit Dimensions –  40 x 40 mm Operative temperature range – 0-70 °C  (but they also plan to release an industrial temperature range SoM) Power – 3.3V | Consumption: 0.3 Watt The company will provide a Debian Linux distribution with […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Linux 3.5 Release

Linux 3.5 Release

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.5: Subject: Linux 3.5 released Ok, not a lot happened since -rc7. There’s a number of MIPS commits (for some reason MIPS has had a horrible track record with the -rc time schedule, I suspect I should just stop pulling late in the game), but most of the rest is pretty small. A couple of dm/md fixes, some gma500 work, make kgdb ‘dmesg’ command work again, some networking fixes, some xfs and cifs noise, yadda yadda. About 50% of the patch is actually the SPEAr clock name renaming that is just some search-and-replace. … Linux 3.4 brought updates to Btrfs file system, some new Intel, AMD and NVidia GPU drivers, X32 ABI, perf tool improvements and support for Yama security module and QNX6 file system. Linux 3.5 brings the following key changes: ext4 metadata checksums:  Ext4 has added the ability to […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC