400 Free Raspberry Pi (Development) Boards for Qt 5 Developers

Remember the 25 – 35 USD ARM11 board Raspberry Pi ? Nokia is now getting involved and plans to speed up Qt 5 development on this nice little hardware. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that Nokia would purchase 400 boards next month and give them away to Qt 5 developers who are willing to port software, develop apps, and test and improve the Qt 5 Linux stack. Mostly likely it will be the “high-end” 35 USD version with Ethernet support and 2556 MB RAM as show below. Beside its ridiculously cheap price, the board key features include Linux support, embedded GPU and OpenGL ES libraries that makes it a usable multimedia device capable of outputting 1080p. Nokia and ICS engineers have already started to port Qt to the Raspberry Pi board using the alpha boards. You can see the Qt Quick 2 emitter demo below running on one of the […]

Linaro 11.11 Release with Kernel 3.1.1 and Android 4.0.1 Support

Linaro has just released version 11.11 based on Linux Kernel 3.1.1 and with support for Android ICS. The Android 4.0.1 Preview build for all low cost development boards supported by Linaro are available at http://releases.linaro.org/11.11/android/images-ics-preview/. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro’s baseline has now been upgraded to 2.3.7. The first Versatile Express Android build has been completed. Pandaboard and Vexpress has been upgraded to kernel 3.1.1. A preview of Ice Cream Sandwich is released and running on Snowball, Origen, iMX53 and on Pandaboard with Linaro kernels. A NEON-optimized libpng has been itegrated in all builds. Preliminary DS-5 support has been integrated. Preliminary WiFi support on Android Origen. Kernel config for each build is available on android-build page. USB Ethernet works on Origen. Camera recording function works on Pandaboard. USB camera can be hotplugged on Pandaboard. Developer Platform Firefox can now be cross-built using multiarch. Instructions are available […]

Remmina : Remote Connection via RDP, VNC, SSH, XDMCP or SFTP

If you need to connect to both Windows and Linux machines remotely,  Remmina is what you need. It is an application that can remotely connect to server using VNC, SSH, XDMCP, SFTP and RDP protocols. So that you can connect to a Windows machine using the default RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) protocol without installing a VNC server. In the screenshot below I setup a Windows RDP and a VNC connection to 192.168.0.102. There are plenty of options. Here’s a screenshot of Remote Desktop Preferences for the RDP client. To install in an Ubuntu or Debian distribution:

To install it in Fedora:

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

Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources – AnDevCon II

The second Android developer Conference (AnDevCon II) took place about 10 days ago. Karim Yaghmour of OperSys published the presentation slides he used during his two Android presentations. The first presentation was Embedded Android Workshop, the same presentation he did at Android Open 2011. The second presentation “Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources” slides can be found below. Those 48 slides cover the following: AOSP’s limitations: Rigid, closed development model, excludes many things… Tearing AOSP apart Forks: Cyanogenmod: After-market handset firmware with custom launcher and lots of tweaks and mods… Replicant: 100% open souce with FDroid marketplace. MIUI: Closed source with UI enhancements. Ports: RIM Playbook:  OMAP4 Tablet based on AOSP. Bluestacks: Android on Windows 7. Alien Dalvik: Android SDK + Meego SDK integration. Mods: XDA Developers. Melding with “Classic” Linux Stack: Rationale: Lots of available stacks in Linux, Android does not provide everything. Road blocks: File system, Bionic C […]

Turn your TV into a Computer with FXI Technologies Cotton Candy USB Stick

FXI Technologies has unveiled a USB stick that turns any screen into an a computer running Android or Ubuntu, and in the future Windows 8 will also be supported. The Cotton Candy will include a Samsung Exynos 4210 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, with a Quad Core Mali 400MP  GPU, like the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. It will also feature 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot capable of holding up to 64GB of flash memory, Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity and an HDMI port. This small device (it measures 8cm x 2.5cm) has decent multimedia capabilities as it can support 1080p decode of MPEG4-SP/H.263/H.264 AVC/MPEG-2/VC1, as well as MP3, AAC, AAC+, Real Audio decoding and JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG pictures. Extra third party codec can also be added. There are 2 main use cases for the Cotton Candy: Connection to a HDMI-capable TV or Display: Connect an HDMI monitor/TV […]

MIPS Releases Kernel 3.0.8, plans for Android 4.0

MIPS has just released Linux Kernel 3.0.8 port for MIPS SoC, the kernel version used by Android 4.0.1. The latest kernel is available on MIPS developer website at http://developer.mips.com/linux/. You can use Git to get the latest kernel source code for MIPS Technologies cores (with hardware fixes and improvements) as follows:

Although git is recommended to ensure you have the latest commit, you can also download a snapshot version from linux-mips FTP site.:

Over the next several weeks, MIPS will be posting updates on the MIPS Developer website regarding Android 4.0 (ICS) with a release planned for mid-december 2011.   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

Technologies and Techniques to Accelerate Embedded Development

I’ve recently attended a webinar entitled “Accelerate Your Next Embedded Development Project: Essential Tools and Techniques for Every Phase of Your Project Lifecycle”  presented by Wind river and VDC Research. The two speakers were: Marc Brown, Wind River VP, Tools and Marketing Operation. Christopher Rommel, Senior Analyst at VDC Research. The webinar was composed of three sections: Industry Challenges. (Wind River) Embedded Development: Data and Trends. (VDC Research) New ways to accelerate development (Wind River) Industry challenges Marc describes the new challenges for device software drivers: Increased security, safety and quality requirements for connectivity Performance scalability: multi-cores, many cores and SoC support. Pressure to lower OPEX (Operating Expenses) Companies are now pushed to increase performance,  become more cost effective and provide a better connectivity while at the same time decrease time to market, project risks and security issues. Data and Trends Christopher first present a slide showing there are still […]

Axiomtek CAPA111: AMD G-Series Single Board Computer

Axiomtek announced the CAPA111, a single board computer powered by AMD G-Series processors T40R (single core @ 1Ghz) or T40E (dual core @ 1Ghz) with up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, LVDS & VGA video output, two gigabit Ethernet, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 SATA ports, 2 COM ports and more. Here are the board specifications: CPU: AMD G-Series APU single core T40R (1.0 GHz) and dual core T40E (1.0 GHz) Chipset: AMD Fusion Controller Hub A50M chipset System Memory: 1 x 204-pin DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM max. up to 4 GB SSD:  1 x CompactFlash Watchdog Timer: 255 levels, 1~255 sec. Expansion Interface: 1 x PCI Express Mini Card Battery: Lithium 3V/220mAH Size: 146 x 104mm Board thickness: 1.6 mm Temperature 0°C ~ +60°C, operation Operation Humidity: 10% ~ 95% relative humidity, non-condensing I/O: MIO: 1 x RS-232/422/485 (COM 1); with +5V/+12V powered 3 x RS-232 (COM 2/3/4) ; with +5V/+12V […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC