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March 13, 2014March 13, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Mediatek MT6589 Linux Source Code, CyanogenMod 11 Image for Wiko Stairway Smartphone

Mediatek and their customers have still not gotten into the habit of complying with the GPL license, and releasing the relevant source code such as the Linux kernel. There appears to be at least one smartphone, Wiko Stairway, where the Linux kernel has been released, and chrmhoffmann, a members of XDA developers forums, has even released on unofficial CyanogenMod 11 ROM (Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat) for the device. There are three source repositories for the Linux kernel, “android device“, and Android. I’ve only looked into the kernel which is version 3.4.5. Mediatek has apparently messed up the Linux kernel quite a bit, and you’ll have to do some funny things to build the kernel, and all Mediatek options in menuconfig are in a sub-section called “Mediatek Properitary Configuration” (sic.), and it’s not possible to simply go to System Type menu to change the processor type for instance. Let’s get the […]

March 10, 2014May 18, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 42 Comments

Amlogic GPL Source Code Release – Kernel 3.10, U-Boot, and Drivers (Wi-Fi, NAND, TVIN, Mali GPU)

Last month, I noticed Amlogic provided links to the Android SDK for S802 / M802 on their open source website, but the only way to get the source was to share your SSH public with Amlogic, so that they give you access. It did not happen, but the company has released the source for Linux 3.10.10, U-boot 2011.03, Realtek and Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers, NAND drivers, “TVIN”drivers, and kernel space GPU drivers for Mali-400 / 450 GPU. There are also some customer board files for Meson 6 only (AML8726-MX / M6) but they do not seem to match the kernel… If you want to build the kernel, including the drivers, you’ll need to download a bunch of files: wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/kernel/arm-src-kernel-2014-03-06-d5d0557b2b.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192du-2014-03-06-7f70d95d29.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192eu-2014-03-06-9766866350.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192cu-2014-03-06-54bde7d73d.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8188eu-2014-03-06-2462231f02.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/brcmap6xxx-2014-03-06-302aca1a31.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/wifi-fw-2014-03-06-d3b2263640.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/modules/aml_tvin-2014-03-06-fb3ba6b1c8.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/modules/aml_nand-2014-03-06-39095c4296.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/customer/aml_customer-2014-03-06-76ce689191.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/gpu/gpu-2014-03-06-0425a1f681.tar.gz You’ll need to extract these tarballs in specific directories:

tar xvf arm-src-kernel-2014-03-06-d5d0557b2b.tar.gz
mkdir -p hardware/amlogic/
mkdir -p hardware/wifi/realtek/drivers
mkdir -p hardware/wifi/broadcom/drivers
mkdir -p hardware/arm/
cd hardware/amlogic
tar xvf ../../../aml_nand-2014-03-06-39095c4296.tar.gz
mv aml_nand-amlogic-nand nand
cd ../wifi/realtek/drivers
tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192du-2014-03-06-7f70d95d29.tar.gz
tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192eu-2014-03-06-9766866350.tar.gz
tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192cu-2014-03-06-54bde7d73d.tar.gz 
tar xvf ../../../../rtk8188eu-2014-03-06-2462231f02.tar.gz
mv rtk8188eu-8188eu 8188eu
mv rtk8192du-8192du 8192du
mv rtk8192cu-8192cu 8192cu
mv rtk8192eu-8192eu 8192eu
cd ../../broadcom/drivers
tar xvf ../../../../brcmap6xxx-2014-03-06-302aca1a31.tar.gz
mv brcmap6xxx-ap6xxx ap6xxx
cd ../../../arm
tar xvf ../../gpu-2014-03-06-0425a1f681.tar.gz
mv gpu-r3p2-01rel3 gpu
cd ..
tar xvf ../../aml_tvin-2014-03-06-fb3ba6b1c8.tar.gz 
mv aml_tvin-amlogic-3.10-bringup tvin

tar xvf arm-src-kernel-2014-03-06-d5d0557b2b.tar.gz

mkdir -p hardware/amlogic/

mkdir -p hardware/wifi/realtek/drivers

mkdir -p hardware/wifi/broadcom/drivers

mkdir -p hardware/arm/

cd hardware/amlogic

tar xvf ../../../aml_nand-2014-03-06-39095c4296.tar.gz

mv aml_nand-amlogic-nand nand

cd ../wifi/realtek/drivers

tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192du-2014-03-06-7f70d95d29.tar.gz

tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192eu-2014-03-06-9766866350.tar.gz

tar xvf ../../../../rtk8192cu-2014-03-06-54bde7d73d.tar.gz

tar xvf ../../../../rtk8188eu-2014-03-06-2462231f02.tar.gz

mv rtk8188eu-8188eu 8188eu

mv rtk8192du-8192du 8192du

mv rtk8192cu-8192cu 8192cu

mv rtk8192eu-8192eu 8192eu

cd ../../broadcom/drivers

tar xvf ../../../../brcmap6xxx-2014-03-06-302aca1a31.tar.gz

mv brcmap6xxx-ap6xxx ap6xxx

cd ../../../arm

tar xvf ../../gpu-2014-03-06-0425a1f681.tar.gz

mv gpu-r3p2-01rel3 gpu

cd ..

tar xvf ../../aml_tvin-2014-03-06-fb3ba6b1c8.tar.gz

mv aml_tvin-amlogic-3.10-bringup tvin

You […]

December 8, 2013December 8, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Geniatech Releases XBMC Linux Image for AML8726-MX based Media Players

A couple of week ago Geniatech released the source for XBMC for Android, and today I’ve been informed they’ve released an XBMC Linux image for their media players based on AMLogic AML8726-MX dual core Cortex A9 SoC, just a few days after the release of MX Linux v1.00 RC1 working for MX2REF, G18REF and g02refDongle (These are not product names, but board codes that can also be found in ro.product.device or ro.product.board in build.prop of Android firmware). You can download MX_BOX-Linux_XBMC20131205.zip which is said to contain the XBMC Linux image for ATV1200, ATV520, ATV400, ATV360, etc… However, it’s said not to work for HDMI dongles such as ATV120, contrary to MX Linux. I haven’t been able to download the file within a reasonable amount of time, so I haven’t been able to check the content, and installation instructions. An anonymous source told me it was likely Geniatech just took the community […]

August 6, 2013August 6, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

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 […]

October 20, 2011October 20, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android 4.0 Source Code To Be Released When Galaxy Nexus Ships

Google never opened Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) source code. It was probably because this OS was only meant to be used with tablets and they feared people would try to use it on smartphone. The good news is that Android 4.0 (ICS) source code will be made available once the Galaxy Nexus ships. Although I’m not sure what license will be used with Android 4.0, that follows exactly the GPL license requirements since you don’t need to release the source code if you don’t provide the binaries. See Jean-Baptiste Queru (Android Open Source Project ) announcement at https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/HB5qQHeNKBQ. In the meantime, the GPL source files that match the Android 4.0 / r14 SDK have been made available: Kernel: https://dl.google.com/dl/android/gpl/android-gpl-kernel-sdk-4.0.1_r1.tgz Platform: https://dl.google.com/dl/android/gpl/android-gpl-platform-sdk-arm-4.0.1_r1.tgz Dev Tools: https://dl.google.com/dl/android/gpl/android-gpl-tools_r14.tgz Extra: https://dl.google.com/dl/android/gpl/android-extra-4.0.1-r14.tgz Like the Android did for all Honeycomb release, this is NOT the full source tree for Android 4.0 (ICS), these are only the GPL parts […]

October 15, 2011October 15, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Archos G9 GPL Source Code

Archos has released the GPL source code for the Archos G9 Tablets on their Gitorious account. This is obviously the same source code for Archos 80 G9 and Archos 101 G9. There are two git repositories for the G9: archos-gpl-gen9 – Archos generation 9 GPL release archos-gpl-gen9-kernel – Archos generation 9 GPL linux kernel 2.6 release The GPL “userspace” source code is divided into 4 directories: buildroot – Buildroot to generate a cross-compilation toolchain, a root filesystem, a kernel image and a bootloader image. hardware – Direcotory containing hardware related source: WL1283 “Wlan” Driver (WiLink 7.0 single-chip WLAN, GPS, Bluetooth and FM solution) packages: libf2m – Library to convert flash videos (FLV) to AVI, MOV or MP4 libmms – Library for streaming video/audio with mmst / mmsh protocols external- Utilities and libraries (Bold indicates external sw not released/used with Archos G8 Source Code) alsa-lib – Audio library alsa-utils – Audio […]

October 10, 2011October 10, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Open Source Licenses Overview: GPL, LGPL, Apache, BSD,…

The great thing about open source code is the large amount of high quality code that is available and many embedded projects use FOSS code as it really speeds up development time. What is not often taken into account are the licenses for the code. Many companies often simply ignore licenses issues and some even go one step further by obfuscating the code to work around dual license issues or to hide the use of a particular open source library. Even though history shows that few companies get sued due to open source license infringements and release of open source code modified in commercial projects often requires the community involvement, open source licenses should still be taken into consideration as the risk still exists. I’ll give an overview of open source licenses in this blog post, as well as recommendation on how to keep your proprietary code closed. Definition of […]