how-to News - Page 32 of 56 - CNX Software

July 20, 2016July 20, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 40 Comments

Getting Started with NanoPi NEO Development Board – Ubuntu Core Firmware

NanoPi NEO is an exciting ARM Linux board due to the power it packs into its small size, and its low price starting at $7.99. It’s made by FriendlyARM, and since I’ve read some people had never heard about the company before, I’d like to point out it has been providing development boards well before the Raspberry Pi board was launched, with products such mini2440 based on a Samsung ARM9 processor introduced around year 2010. Anyway, I asked the company if they were willing to send 2 samples for review, as I plan to remove the USB & Ethernet port on one of them. Instead I got a 4 boards and accessories, so I’m going to start reviewing the board by writing a quick start guide, showing how to setup it, and check out the Ubuntu core provided by the company. If you are a fan of armbian made Debian […]

July 15, 2016July 15, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Lepton Image Compression Achieves 22% Lossless Compression of JPEG Images (on Average)

Dropbox stores billions of images on their servers, most of them JPEGs, so if they can reduce the size of pictures it can have a big impact on their storage requirements, so the company developed Lepton image compression, which – on average – achieved 22% lossless compression on the images stored in their cloud. Compression and decompression speed is also important, since the files are compressed when uploaded and uncompressed on the fly when downloaded so that the complete process is transparent to the end users, who only see JPEG photos, and the company claims 5MB/s compression, and 15MB/s compression, again on average. The good news is that the company released Lepton implementation on Github, so in theory it could also be used to increase the capacity of NAS which may contain lots of pictures. So I’ve given it a try in a terminal window in Ubuntu 14.04, but it […]

July 11, 2016July 11, 2016 by Karl Johnson - 11 Comments

Morefine M1+ Review – A Dual Boot Windows and Android TV Stick

Karl here and I will be reviewing the Morefine M1+. It is an Intel based stick PC with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 processor with 2GB RAM and 64 GB of storage. It dual boots Windows 10 Home 32 bit and Android 5.1. In this review, I won’t be doing many benchmarks because they have been done a lot in the past. Be careful when researching this product because there are 2 devices with same name with different specs. The other one has an Intel Atom z3735 and only 32GB storage and Android 4.4. The box came expertly wrapped and I have never seen a package delivered and protected so well. In the box was the stick, short HDMI extension, power cable, and instruction manual. No micro USB OTG cable is included. I didn’t find this an issue because I had several already. Specs OS Version: OS Windows 10 (Trial Version) […]

July 1, 2016July 2, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Stress Testing Windows mini PCs with OCCT Overclock Checking Tool

I’m mostly a Linux user, but the marketplace has chosen Windows 10 as its preferred operating systems for mini PCs, so I’ve been reviewing fanless (or not) mini PCs running Windows 10 for around two years since Intel decided to provide low cost and low power processors. I normally run some benchmarks such as PCMark 8 or 3DMark, as well as typical user tasks, while monitoring CPU temperature and throttling using HWInfo64 utility, but those benchmarks are not really pushing the device to its limits. However, I’ve just learned out about OCCT “Overclock Checking Tool” that’s just doing that, and installed OCCT 4.4.2 on Vorke V1 to check it out. The tool has four taps: CPU: OCCT, CPU: Linpack, GPU: 3D, and Power Supply to stress test different part of the system. I just let it run for over 3 hours after pressing the ON buttons, and you can see […]

June 29, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox

I’ve been reviewing several Intel Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and Braswell mini PCs in the last year or so, and I always end up recommending Microsoft Edge browser over Firefox or Chrome for people wanting to watch YouTube videos, as the last two browsers always drop many frames with the video stuttering regularly. However I noticed that while Edge is playing MP4/AVC (H.264) video, the other two browser would normally stream WebM/VP9 videos, and it could be the cause of the problem as H.264 can be hardware accelerated, but VP9 not, and the low power processor might not quite powerful enough to handle 1080p VP9 video decoding smoothly. So I investigated the issues with Vorke V1 mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron J3160 processor (6W TDP) with the three browsers by first checking enabled codecs in YouTube HTML5 page. Microsoft Edge has both VP8 and VP9 disabled When I […]

May 31, 2016May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Pine A64 Board Quick Start Guide & Benchmarks with Android 5.1

Pine A64 is one of the development boards with the best cost/performance ratio, as it sells as low as $15 + shipping. I received Pine A64+ board with 2GB RAM at the end of last month, and decided to start playing with Android, as Linux distributions such as Longsleep Ubuntu appear to require a little more work. So in this post, I’ll report my experience with installing and running Android 5.1 on the board, and share some Android benchmark results. Pine A64 Board Pictures You’ll receive the board in cardboard package with Pine64 branding. You can check which version of the board you’ve been sent on the side of the package: PA64512 (512 MB RAM), PA641GB (1GB RAM), or PA642GB (2GB RAM). The top of the board has been photographed often but here it is again. I’ve been sent the 2GB version without wireless module. The bottom of the board […]

May 28, 2016May 28, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

How to Install PHP 5.6 (and Xibo Digital Signage CMS) in Ubuntu 16.04

Xibo is an open source digital signage using a client / server architecture, and in the past I wrote a tutorial showing how to use it, and ran Xibo Python client on ARM Linux TV box, but with software handling only so rendering scrolling text was not very smooth at all, and video decoding was not really possible. But now I have Star Cloud PCG02U Intel TV stick which costs just $70 shipped with Ubuntu 14.04, and that I have upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04, and I thought that would be a great low cost Xibo Linux client which should have pretty good performance. I started by installing Xibo server, only to find out that the cross-platform Python client had been phased out, with now only Windows and Android clients available. So I canceled my plan. I still had some challenges installing Xibo server on Ubuntu 16.04, so I’ll report my […]

May 26, 2016July 7, 2016 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

Updating Star Cloud PCG02U to Ubuntu 16.04 with WiFi and HDMI Audio Support

I completed my review of PCG02U Ubuntu TV stick a few days ago, and I was quite satisfied with the device, but since Ubuntu 16.04 was released last month, I thought it might be fun to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. I’m go through the complete steps including building a new kernel for HDMI audio, and the drivers for WiFi, but you should be able to install Ubuntu 16.04 for Bay Trail and Cherry Trail processor with the image made by Linuxium and a USB stick. Star Cloud PCG02U OS Support and Warranty Before I go through the instructions, you may want to read the conditions on MeLE’s Aliexpress PCG02U page. They meant Ubuntu 14.04 instead of 14.0.4, but the important part is that if something goes wrong trying alternative OS, you may lose your warranty. Upgrade Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04 Upgrading from one LTS version to […]