linaro News - Page 19 of 27 - CNX Software

August 3, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

AllWinner A10 Initramfs Support and Linaro 12.07 Image

An initramfs is a minimal root filesystem that is loaded at an early stage of the boot process, before the rootfs partition is mounted. This is optional but is now used by many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu in order to speed up boot time among others things. Up to recently, there was no support for this in the AllWinner A10 nightly builds, and there would be lot of error messages due to ureadahead process with Ubuntu, but I’ve changed that by: Using a boot.scr file (U-Boot Script) for each supported device in order to either follow the default init boot method or do an initramfs boot if uInitrd file is present in the FAT partition. Adding a script (a1x-initramfs.sh) to generate and install uInitrd initramfs in the rootfs. The initramfs can’t be generated at build time since the hardware packs are (mostly) distribution agnostic. If you want an initramfs, […]

August 1, 2012August 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Gumstix Waysmall Silverlode Linaro Ubuntu Computer based on TI Sitara AM3703

Gumstix has just announced the Waysmall Silverlode computer, a small form factor device running Linaro ARM optimized Ubuntu and designed for developers of commercial and industrial applications such as digital signage players and remote servers. It’s based on Overo EarthSTORM Computer-on-Module (Texas Instruments Sitara AM3703 @ 1 GHz, 512MB Flash and 512MB RAM) and consumes less than 2.5 W. Here are the specs of the device: Processor Texas Instruments Sitara AM3703 processor (ARM Cortex-A8 ) @ 1 GHz 800 MHz is recommended for reliable performance System Memory 512 MB RAM Storage 512 MB NAND flash microSD card slot Video Output HDMI (DVI-D) Audio I/O Stereo Audio In /Out jacks Connectivity 10/100Mb Ethernet USB USB Host, USB OTG and USB Console Connectors 2 x 70-pin AVX connectors 1 x 27-pin Hirose camera connector Battery holder for 6mm rechargeable coin Dimensions 11.0 x 4 .4 x 1.8 cm Power 5V The computer […]

July 28, 2012July 28, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android Jelly Bean on Samsung Origen Development Board (Video)

Linaro Android team has started to port Android Jelly Bean to Samsung Origen board (powered by Exynos 4 dual core processor) and can now show Android 4.1 running on the board with hardware accelerated graphics. This is a preliminary image: the touchscreen, graphics, adb works, and you can use keyboard and mouse as input devices, but Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and multimedia (hardware video decoding) still have to be worked on. If you have an Origen board, you can give it a try by downloading the binaries @ https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/origen-jb-gcc47-samsunglt-stable-blob/, and follow the instructions to create a bootable SD card with linaro-media-create. 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

July 27, 2012July 27, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.07 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4. Some work has been done on Jelly Bean (but the port is for next month), several benchmark tools have been added to LAVA as Linaro wants to provide standard benchmarks for Android, Linaro ALIP image now uses LXDE by default with a smaller image and improved performance, and Open Embedded images are now available (minimal and LAMP stack). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated Open overlay tarballs working pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds Linaro […]

July 1, 2012July 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 12.06 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.06 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4 (r2.1). This release brings further multimedia enablement for Android as well as some improvement to perf for Android, improved instructions & scripts for multi-arch on Ubuntu, and lots of little improvements and bugs fixes. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Multimedia enablement on AOSP, patches are in review. Most of the benchmarking applications have been automated via Monkeyrunner, working on PandaBoard and Snowball. Update panda-ics-gcc47-tilt-tracking-blob build to the TI LT 3.4 kernel. USB camera preview and still capture forward ported to tilt-tracking. 3D graphics and multimedia working on tilt-stable. IOMMU for Origen’s Multi format codec (MFC) enabled. IOMMU for Origen’s FIMC enabled. (FIMC stands for Fully Interactive Mobile Camera, and it’s used for camera input). Snowball upgraded to Android 4.0.4. Cortex strings landed in Linaro Android and submitted to AOSP (https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/38031/). This is part of […]

June 24, 2012June 25, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Oval Elephant Android / Linaro mini PC HDMI Stick

Since Rikomagic MK802 and Zero Device Z802 mini PCs have gone viral and started the Android mini PC craze, this type of device has been popping a bit everywhere… The latest interesting device I found is Oval Elephant Mini PC based on AllWinner A10 processor with 1 GB RAM and selling for 71.49 USD. They have appears to have a whooping 11 in stocks now to be shipped on the 3rd of July, but they are also taking pre-orders and if there is enough demand (over 1,000 pieces), the price would go down to 68 USD. The device pictured above is just a prototype, and they have decided to replace the HDMI mini male output by a proper HDMI output (probably male). As I said before I prefer this form factor, especially since you can just connect mini BlueTooth dongles (no sure that one works with Android / Linux though) to […]

June 22, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 141 Comments

Ubuntu 12.04 Server ARMHF Image for Mele A1000/A2000

I’ve seen quite a few people who want to use the Mele A1000 – or its brother the Mele A2000 – media player as a server (Sacrilege!). Since recent ARM servers are running Ubuntu 12.04, and Tom Gall has (conveniently) posted the live-build config necessary to generate Ubuntu 12.04 Server image this week, I thought I’d give it a try on Mele A1000. The image generated is a headless system running Apache 2 and sshd (openssh_server). I’ll detail the steps I followed to generate this image first, so if you just want to try the SD card image, scroll down at the end of the post. The first step is to generate Ubuntu Linaro Server rootfs, by following the Live-Build instructions on Linaro website together with Tom’s live build config. I’ve followed those steps in a machine running Ubuntu 12.04. Let’s install the required packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linaro-maintainers/tools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install live-build multistrap qemu-user-static git p7zip-full

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linaro-maintainers/tools

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install live-build multistrap qemu-user-static git p7zip-full

Configure the build and […]

June 16, 2012June 16, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

The Future of ARM Linux by David Rusling, Linaro CTO

David Rusling, Linaro CTO, gave a presentation about the future of ARM Linux at Linaro Connect, in Hong Kong, at the end of May, where he discussed the current status of ARM Linux for mobile, consumer and enterprise markets, the future of ARM Linux and Linaro involvement. He started by saying what he wants personally: A mobile phone that can’t be easily hacked, with 10 hours of battery life for any kind of applications and data must be synchronized in the cloud. The second slide entitled “Future”, but it looked like more the present to me, addresses 3 markets: Mobile: Android vs. iOS, although Windows 8 is coming Post PC: The desktop fades and laptop/tablet merge (think Asus Transformer) Enterprise: Cooling and Power is key and the enterprise is ready for innovation, meaning it will start using ARM platforms. He then focuses on Linux explaining that Android has been the […]