98 Raspberry Pi Boards Left for Qt Developers

In November 2011, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced that Nokia purchased codes for 400 boards from the 1st 10,000 batch, in order to give them away to selected developers that are interested in helping develop and test Qt 5 on the Raspberry Pi. This developer program is called QtonPi. The surprising part if that they struggle to distribute all those boards. Although to date 425 people have been selected, only 302 are currently eligible to receive a board because over 100 developers did not provide their details to receive the free Raspberry Pi board namely: Their full name The link to their wiki user profile. The area of the “QtonPi Accepted Page” where they are listed. The country where the board will be shipped If by chance, you are reading this blog, have been selected but you can’t see “OK” or “CODE SENT” next to your user ID, you should […]

Using OpenOCD JTAG in Android Kernel Debugging – Android Builder Summit 2012

Mike Anderson, CTO and Chief Scientist for The PTR Group, gives a tutorial about Linux kernel debugging in Android with OpenOCD JTAG at the Android Builder Summit in February 2012. Abstract: Owing to the use of the Linux kernel, Android device drivers can be debugged using many of the same techniques as Linux. Still, much of the user-space interface code typically found in Linux is missing in Android. This complicates the debugging of kernel driver code. This presentation will demonstrate the use of the open on-chip debug (OpenOCD) software and an inexpensive JTAG to debug Android kernel code. The target audience for this presentation are platform developers looking to debug their kernel code such as device drivers. This presentation is targeted at intermediate-level developers with some understanding of kernel code development. You can also download the presentation slides on linuxfoundation.org website. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as […]

Android Device Porting Tutorial – Android Builder Summit 2012

Benjamin Zores, Open Source Software and Multimedia Architect at Alcatel-Lucent, gives step-by-step to port Android to your own device at Android Builder Summit in February 2012. Abstract: This talk is presented as a step by step tutorial meant for Android platform rookies, as to discover all Androidisms one has to tackle down to bring his own custom device to life. Based on a real-life Android 4.0 ICS device porting experience, the talk will cover early board bringup (from U-Boot and Fastboot to Linux kernel and drivers), AOSP device integration, Android-specific device init customization, touchscreen input layer adaptations and Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) driver interfaces development. You can also download the presentation slides on linuxfoundation.org website. 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

Command Line Methods to Completly Delete a Hard Drive in Linux

Here are 2 methods to completly dlete the content of an hard drive with dd and shred commands. With those methods you won’t be able to recover the data. This can be useful in case you want to sell,  throw away your hard drive / computer or have doubtful activities. If the partitions you want to delete are system (boot) partitions you’ll need to start your system with a live CD / USB such as SystemRescueCD or GParted. Finding the location of a drive or partition In order to know the exact path for your drive, you can use the fdisk command as root or sudoer: # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1887.4 GB, 1887436800000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 229467 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sda1               1          25      200781   83  Linux /dev/sda2              26      229335  1841932575   83  Linux […]

Cross-compiling FreeRDP Windows Remote Desktop Client for ARM Linux (in Debian/Ubuntu)

Last month, I wrote the instructions to Cross-compile VMWare View for ARM Linux as I intended to “run” Windows 8 in an ARM client (most likely the Raspberry Pi) via PCoIP. However, the procedure to do so seems slightly complicated and requires to purchase a specific VMWare server software (VMware vSphere 5) or download a free trial. The good news is that there are other options such as VNC or RDP (Remote Desktop protocol) and Remmina, a Remote Connection client is available for Linux. As nothing is ever simple, another issue occured: if you are using a stable release of Linux (e.g. Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu 11.10) they come with older version of Remmina and either the connection is successful but the display is garbled (Version 0.7.x) either it crashes when connecting to Windows 8 via RDP (Version 0.8.x). The latest version (Remmina 1.0.0) fixes the problem and is available in […]

How to build qemu-system-arm in Linux

Most (all?) Linux distributions have a binary package for qemu-system (including qemu-system-arm) in order to emulate non-x86 targets such as ARM, MIPS, PPC, Alpha and more. However, in some case you may need to very latest version of qemu-system and it may not be able yet for your distribution. Here’s how to do to build qemu-system-arm without building all qemu-system-***: Download the latest stable version of qemu (qemu 1.0.1 at the time this post was written):

or get the latest source code (development tree) which has the very latest features and bug fixes, but may not work or compile:

or get the latest source code from linaro (which may be more up-to-date for ARM targets):

Configure qemu to build ARM targets:

Build and install qemu-system-arm:

Verify the latest version of qemu-ssytem-arm is installed:

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time […]

Instructions to Run Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix in QEMU

As mentioned in my previous post, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Fedora 14 Remix SD card image that can be installed either via  installer (easiest method) or using dd / windd as with the previous image. In this blog post, I’ll give the instructions how to run Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix in QEMU using a similar method than the one I used for Debian Squeeze. I tested since in machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian 6.0.4. Download the image using BitTorrent raspberrypi-fedora-remix-14-r1.img.gz.torrent or via the HTTP link available on Raspberry Pi Download page. Decompress the image:

Download kernel 3.0.4 image for qemu, if you don’t have it yet.

Since the rootfs is full (in the real board it will be resized to the size of the SD Card), we need to increase the size of the rootfs partition. First create and empty 3G […]

Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix Available for Download

Seneca has officially released Raspberry Pi Fedora 14 Remix, the main distributions for the Raspberry Pi low cost ARM11 board based on Broadcom BCM2835. There are two methods to install Fedora 14 for the Raspberry Pi on the SD Card: Using the Installer This method is available for: Fedora 16 – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/fedora/fedora-arm-installer-1.0.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm Windows Vista or Windows 7 – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/windows/fedora-arm-installer-1.0.0.zip Other Linux (Python) – http://files.velocix.com/c1410/fedora/installer/source/faii-1.0.0.tar.gz For details on the installation procedure, go to http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Raspberry_Pi_Fedora_Remix_Installation Using dd This is the method used for the previous Linux images released for the Raspberry Pi. You can download it via Bittorrent. The HTTP download links are not yet available but will be soon on Raspberry Pi Download page. The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix 14 is based on the following: Fedora package collection version: 14 Kernel version: 3.1.9 Architecture: armv5tel The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix 17 will be the second version of the Remix released: Release […]

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