Linux News - Page 451 of 474 - CNX Software

May 4, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Xibo Digital Signage Running on Mele A1000 AllWinner A10 Set-Top Box

Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]

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

Yocto Project Release 1.2 Announced

The Yocto Project Release 1.2 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Denzil” and based on Poky 7.0 is the third release of the project. The project was announced in October 2010 to provide developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. Yocto Project 1.2 Features: HOB redesigned with new user interface and work flow. HOB is a GUI based tool for users to customize and build an embedded Linux image in a more intuitive and easier way. Build appliance, which is a set of changes and enhancements to enable users to build a virtual machine image running Linux built with the Yocto Project. Within the Linux running on the virtual machine, users can customize and build their own customized embedded Linux images. Error message handling improvement, making error message more efficient, useful and accurate to users. New kernel update […]

April 30, 2012June 8, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in Acer Aspire One D255E Netbook

I previously installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my Acer Aspire One D255E network (Atom N455 with GMA3150 GPU), and there were quite a few issues to solve with Ethernet, Wifi and the SD Card but eventually, everything worked fine. I have now upgraded it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, using the instructions I posted yesterday. The good news is that WiFi and the SD card worked right after the installation, but Ethernet would not work and there were 2 new issues: The system was very slow The touchpad would not work It might be possible that the touchpad and Ethernet issues do not occur by doing a fresh installation with Ubuntu 12.04 ISO, but I haven’t tried. Improving Ubuntu 12.04 Performance I noticed that if you just moved the mouse over the launcher, compiz (composting window manager handling 3D acceleration via OpenGL) would use 100% CPU. I ran glxinfo to verify […]

April 29, 2012April 29, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Upgrading Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and were expecting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to be available in the Upgrade Manager, you were wrong. Well, at least I was wrong… Canonical won’t make it available via the Upgrade Manager in the first release, but only in July with Ubuntu 12.04.1 release, and the company recommends that most LTS users wait until then before upgrading to 12.04. But if you can’t possibly wait that long, you can run: do-release-upgrade -d or update-manager -d to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) to Ubuntu 12.04 (aka Precise Pangolin). The first command will run in the terminal, the second will start the Update Manager and allow you to select “New Ubuntu release ‘12.04’ is available”. For details on why you should NOT upgrade yet, see http://askubuntu.com/questions/125825/upgrading-lts-to-lts-server-why-wait-for-the-first-point-release. The first time I tried to upgrade I had the following errors: Could not calculate the upgrade An unresolvable […]

April 28, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

How to Create Your Own Debian / Ubuntu Image for Mele A1000 (AllWinner A10 Based STB)

Developers working on AllWinner A10 have released an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS SD card image (4GB) for the Mele A1000. I’ll show how you can create your own Debian or Ubuntu image based on this image for any size of SD Card using Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) and the recent Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as example. The current image is not perfect, for example Ethernet doesn’t work (but you can still get network connectivity with WiFi), the NAND flash can not be accessed, the system does not appear to be very stable when running X and a few more issues. But this will be fixed by the developer community over time. First download the SD card image wget http://hands.com/~lkcl/mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma Install 7z (if you don’t have it yet) and decompress the file: sudo apt-get install p7zip-full 7z x mele-ubuntu-lucid.img.lzma The decompressed size is 4008706048, which might be larger than your 4GB SD Card […]

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

Linaro 12.04 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.04 based on Linux Kernel 3.4-rc3 and Android 4.0.4_r1.1. This release already provides Ubuntu 12.04 LTS images for Pandaboard, Snowball, Origen and Versatile Express, and all community builds (nano, ALIP…) are based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin as well. This should provide significant performance boosted compared to Ubuntu 11.10 thanks to hard-float support and other optimization (See Phoronix Benchmarks). A lot of work since to have gone into big.LITTLE implementation, HTML5 is now supported in Firefox, and it seems Linaro is still working on ARMv6 as they provided VP8 optimizations and improved the toolchain for this architecture. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Finished Snowball Multimedia enablement. Updated all builds to AOSP ICS 4.0.4_r1.1. Switched all builds to 4.7. Updated base toolchain components MPFR and GMP. Ported htop to Android. Ported stressapptest to Android for big.LITTLE Testing. Implemented and ran weekly big.LITTLE tests. Integrated […]

April 25, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Olimex A13-OLinuXino Could Become a Proper Raspberry Pi Alternative

Olimex recently announced they produced the first 10 prototypes of iMX233-OLinuXino Development Board, a low-end Linux development board that will cost 30 Euros, with specifications inferior to the Raspberry Pi. They have now announced their plan to design A13-OLinuxXino development board based on the new AllWinner A13 chipset, a strip down version of AllWinner A10 without HDMI nor SATA. Thanks to the low cost of AllWinner A13 (5 USD for very large orders / 10 USD in smaller quantities), Olimex plans to sell the new A13-OLinuxXino board for the same price as the iMX233-OLinuXino but with a faster 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and 256 or 512 MB RAM. I assume their will be 2 versions as well, the MINI for 29,95 Euros and the MAXI version with 2 more USB 2.0 host ports and 10/100Mbit Ethernet for 44.95 Euros. This board could be a very interesting alternative to the Raspberry […]

April 23, 2012April 23, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

199 USD iWave Systems Freescale i.MX508 RainboW-G13S Development Board

iWave Systems has just uploaded a new video of its new Freescale .i.MX508 low cost development board RainboW-G13S Quick Start Board, an alternative to the original Freescale i.MX53 QSB. This board targets the development of eReaders, industrial kiosks, home/industrial/office automation, portable medical devices and appliance control applications. Here are the specifications of this development board: CPU – Freescale i.MX508 processor (Cortex A8) @ 800MHz System Memory – 256MB LPDDR2 Storage – 2/4 GB micro SD card loaded with boot code and Linux, 4MB SPI Flash (optional) and 8 GB eMMC (optional) Connectivity – 10/100Mbps Ethernet USB – Micro USB 2.0 Device port, 2x USB 2.0 Host Type A port Standard SD port for SDIO expansions Video Output – VGA Audio – Audio IN & OUT port Debug Ports – DB9 Debug Serial port & JTAG connector Expansion connector port for EPD & LCD expansion. The company provides Board Support Packages […]