AllWinner Linux-sunxi Community Presentation and Status Report – FOSDEM 2014

Oliver Schinagl, a member of linux-sunxi community working on open source kernel and bootloader for AllWinner SoCs, has given a presentation of the community at FOSDEM 2014 to give an overview, and show what progress has been made to date. I’ll write a summary in this post, but if you want to watch the video and/or access the slides scroll down at the bottom of the post. After explaining what sunxi is, and introducing himself, he gave some information about AllWinner and their SoCs: Founded in 2007 in Zhuhai, Chiang now with 550 employees including 450+ engineers 15% market share in 2013 for tablet SoCs, only behind Apple. Products: F-series SoC (2010), A10 (2011), A13, A10s (2012), and A20 (2013). (cnsoft He skipped A31(s) and A80 here as they are not really supported by the community). They list “Open Source Source” and “GPLv3” in their marketing materials although they clearly […]

How to Build and Run Tizen 2.0 on AllWinner Boards – FOSDEM 2014

Leon Anavi has spent some time building and running Tizen for Olimex A10s-OLinuXino-MICRO board based onAllWinner A10s cortex A8 processor, and gave a short presentation at FOSDEM 2014 showing the main steps involved in the project. The final result is basically a non-portable Tizen tablet with a main board connected to an LCD display. If you have an LCD screen, you could also use a monitor (VGA/HDMI) instead. After a short description of the hardware, and explaining it should also work on other AllWinner platforms such as Cubieboard, Leon gave a few no-nonsense recommendations he learned from his mistakes: Get a USB serial board for debugging Use recommended accessories from the manufacturer such as power supply or LCD display to make development easier Buy a board that can boot from micro SD or SD card, again for ease of development If something does not work… Restart the board! 🙂 In […]

Top 10 Posts of 2013 and Stats on CNXSoft Blog

This is the last day of the year, and just like in 2012, I’ll look back on the main trends of this year,  post a list of the top 10 posts of 2013 on cnx-software.com, and add some fun stats about the site and my visitors. 2013 has been the year of quad core media players and mini PCs, especially those based on Rockchip RK3188, XBMC is now featured in many Android STBs, “big.LITTLE” and “Octa-core” have been the buzz words on the application processor front, Google has entered the HDMI TV sticks market with the ChromeCast, and is competing with Miracast / DLNA TV dongles, we’ve gotten more and more low cost Linux development boards, crowdfunding has almost gone mainstream, and the Internet of things has started to take off thanks to new technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy. I’ve compiled the list using data from Google Analytics, filtered […]

Tizen 3.0 Features & Tizen Lite Unveiled

We have just learned about NX300M camera, the first Tizen device, based on Tizen 1.0, but development of the new mobile operating systems is still going on, and the key features of Tizen 3.0, as well as Tizen Lite, Tizen for low-end hardware, have been unveiled at the Tizen Developer Summit on 11th of November 2013. Tizen 3.0 features: Update core OS and toolchain Multiple user support 64-bit Intel and ARM architecture support (New) 3D UI Framework with 3D rendering for 2D and 3D objects in 3D, and a dynamic animation library WayLand based compositor replacing X Crosswalk – HTML5 based application runtime based on Chromium/Blink Tizen 3.0 release is scheduled for Q3 2014, so the first Tizen smartphones and tablets which are expected for Q1 2014 will probably ship with Tizen 2.2.1, or even possibly with an earlier version. Android KitKat 4.4 has been optimized to run smoothly on […]

Samsung NX300M Camera Is the First Tizen Device

Announced in 2011, Tizen operating system aimed to be used in  smart TVs, tablets, smartphones,netbooks, and in-vehicle infotainment devices. After 2 years development, several products based on Tizen are now ready to be launched, but the very first one, Samsung NX300M does not fit in any of the aforementioned category as it is a camera, which have been sold last month in South Korea. Although Tizen 2.2.1 has just been released, the mirrorless camera runs Tizen 1.0 with the following key features: Sensor – 20.3 MP CMOS sensor Display – 3.3″ 768K Touch AMOLED LCD with WVGA (800 x 480) resolution ISO sensitivity – Auto, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800, 25600 (1 or 1/3EV step) * AUTO ISO upper level is selectable. (Up to ISO1600) Video Output – NTSC, PAL HDMI Connectivity – USB, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, GPS, and NFC Storage –  SD, SDHC, SDXC, UHS-1 Battery – […]

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2013 Schedule – Build Systems, Security, Device Tree, Debugging & Profiling Techniques, and More

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2013 will conveniently start right after LinuxCon 2013, last 2 days (October 23-24), and take place at the same location: the Edinburgh International Conference Center, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. The Linux Foundation has published the schedule for the conference, so I’ll make my own virtual schedule with sessions that I find particularly interesting. Thursday – 24th of October 9:30 – 10:10 – Timeline For Embedded Linux by Chris Simmonds, Consultant, 2net Limited Today, Linux is woven into the fabric of our technology. Things such as printers, routers, TVs and phones all have their own “Inner Penguin”. Yet it was never originally intended to be used beyond desktop and server PCs. A lot of things had to happen before Linux could break out of the PC environment and make its way in the world as a jobbing jack-of-all-trades. Since the early beginnings of embedded Linux in the late 1990’s many people have contributed […]

LinuxCon Europe 2013 Schedule – Web Technologies, Debugging Techniques, Wayland, and More

I’ve just received an email from the Linux Foundation saying the schedule for LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe 2013 had been made available. The conference will take place for 3 days (October 21-23, 2013) in the Edinburgh International Conference Center, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. There will be over 100 conference sessions, and several co-located events including: Automotive Linux Summit, the Embedded Linux Conference, Gluster Workshop, KVM Forum, Tizen Summit, Xen Project Developer Summit. As I’ve recently done with LinuxCon North America 2013 and ARM TechCon 2013, I’ll make a virtual schedule with selected developer sessions using the event’s schedule builder. You may find out several sessions will also be given in LinuxCon North America. Monday – 21st of October 11:00 – 11:50 – Bluetooth Smart Devices and Low Energy Support on Linux by João Paulo Rechi Vita, INdT This presentation will cover a brief introduction on how the Bluetooth Low Energy technology […]

LinuxCon North America 2013 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2013 will take place on September 16 – 18, 2013 in New Orleans, LA. The event will be co-located with several other conferences: the Linux Plumbers Conference, the Xen Project User Summit, the OpenDaylight Mini-Summit, the Gluster Workshop 2013, the UEFI Plugfest, the Linux Wireless Summit, the Linux Security Summit, and CloudOpen 2013. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, and legal, operations, and developers related sessions as well as tutorials and workshops. There will be around 150 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ve gone through developer sessions and selected one for each time period. Monday, September 16 10:35 – 11:25 – UEFI and Linux by Kirk Bresniker, HP UEFI has become ubiquitous on the PC client systems and is coming up on servers and ARM-based systems, it is becoming the converged firmware infrastructure. UEFI Secure Boot feature has attracted a lot of attention from […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC