Linux Conference Australia and FOSDEM 2013 Videos are Now Online

FOSDEM 2013 took place last week, and the organizers are in the process of uploading videos. Up to now, 5 main tracks sessions have been uploaded (Firefox OS;  Free, open, secure and convenient communications; FreedomBox 1.0;  Samba 4; and systemd, Two Years Later) as well as over 20 lightning talks. You can find the videos at http://video.fosdem.org/2013. You may also want to check my previous post for a lists of interesting talks, and I’ll probably feature some FOSDEM 2013 videos in this blog, at least the open source GPU driver talk. Linux Conference Australia took place on January 28 – February 1, 2013, and the 5-day conference featured lots of talks including several dealing with graphics in Linux, and one developer apparently trashing X in terms of complexity and performance, and explaining how Wayland was better. Others Linux sessions dealt with subject such as 3D printing, supercomputing, Arduino, big.LITTLE processing, […]

Raspberry Pi Model A is Now Available (But Only in Europe)

The Raspberry Pi has just announced that RS Components and Premier Farnell/element14 have now Raspberry Pi Model A boards in stock. Raspberry Pi Model A is a cost down version of Model B using the exact same PCB but with less RAM (256 MB vs 512 MB), no Ethernet, and only one USB port. This model seems more suitable for embedded projects, and you can get connectivity via Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 3G… USB dongles. It consumes about a third of the power of the Model B, which will certain help with projects powered by solar panels or batteries. It could also be suitable as an even cheaper XBMC player, but if you need to add a USB Hub to connect extra peripherals, it may not really be worth it. Model A is only be available in Europe for now, but will eventually be available worldwide. It will cost UK customers 26.02 […]

Red Raspberry Pi Board is Now Available in China

If you have a Raspberry Pi, most likely it will have a green PCB since that’s the way they are manufactured it. The good news is that the Raspberry Pi is be available in its natural color Red very soon, however it will only be officially sold in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The reason for the geographical limitation is because Farnell and RS components have a worldwide co-exclusive license to sell the Raspberry Pi, and the selected Chinese manufacturer, Egoman Technology Corp , won’t be allowed to sell out of China. However, it will be hard to prevent third parties in China from buying the product, and selling it via Ebay or Aliexpress. The other reason for the differentiation is that the Red Raspberry Pi won’t be CE/FCC certified, even though, at the beginning, at least it will basically have the same components of the Green Raspberry […]

XBMC 12.0 Frodo Stable Release

XBMC developers have just announced the release of XBMC 12.0 (Frodo) which is available for desktop platforms (OSX, Linux / Ubuntu, Windows),  Apple TV, iOS, Android (HW support limited), and even as a specific build for the Raspberry Pi. Other key features for this release include: HD audio support, including DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD, via XBMC AudioEngine Live TV and PVR support h.264 10bit (aka Hi10P) video software decoding for anime 64bit support in OSX to match the 64bit support in Linux Improved image support, allowing the database to accommodate numerous additional image types and more interesting and complex skins Improved AirPlay support across all platforms, including AirPlay audio in XBMC for Windows to match the other platforms Improved controller support in Windows and Linux Advanced Filtering in the library Video library tags to complement movie sets Advanced UPnP sharing Default video languages now match the language being used by XBMC Translations […]

Raspberry Pi Now Has Experimental Support for VP6, VP8, MJPEG and Ogg Theora Video Codecs

The guys working on the Raspberry Pi (mainly dom) have added preliminary support for VP6, VP8, MJPEG, and Ogg Theora free video codecs, as well as Ogg Vorbis audio codec. Unlike H.264, MPEG-2 and VC1, those are not handled by the hardware video decoder in Broadcom BCM2835 processor, but are accelerated by the Videocore GPU. This means that only SD (and possibly 720p) videos are supported for those codecs. The best way to get support is probably to patiently wait for the Raspberry Pi foundation to release a new Raspbian image, but in case you couldn’t possibly wait, here are the steps to follow: Download and run Hexxeh’s rpi-update script in the Raspberry Pi in order to get the very latest build:

Add the following two lines to /boot/config.txt:

Reboot the Raspberry Pi The GPU firmware is now updated, but you still need the latest version of omxplayer. […]

Qt on Embedded Systems – ELCE 2012

Lars Knoll, chief maintainer for the Qt Project, gives a presentation about Qt on embedded systems, including a demo with the Raspberry Pi at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. Abstract: For well over 10 years, Qt has been used in many types of embedded devices, ranging from high-end medical systems, through mobile phones and smartphones, all the way to simple devices like coffee makers. This presentation will show some of the work that has been put in Qt throughout the years to support embedded devices, some of the challenges that the development team faced in order to bring a fully-featured desktop toolkit to resource-limited devices, along with solutions they came up with. Time permitting, the presenter will also show Qt demos running on an embedded device. This session is intended for embedded application developers looking to make use of the capabilities of recent hardware, as well […]

Your New ARM SoC Linux Support Check-List – ELCE 2012

Thomas Petazzoni, embedded Linux engineer and trainer at Free Electrons, describes the steps he followed to add a new Marvell SoC to the mainline kernel at ELCE 2012. Abstract: Since Linus Torvalds raised warnings about the state of the ARM architecture support in the Linux kernel, a huge amount of effort and reorganization has happened in the way Linux supports ARM SoCs. From the addition of the device tree to the pinctrl subsystem, from the new clock framework to the new rules in code organization and design, the changes have been significant over the last one and half year in the Arm Linux kernel world. Based on the speaker’s experience on getting the support for the new Marvell Armada 370 and Armada XP SoC support in the mainline Linux kernel, we will give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support. We aim at […]

Top 10 Posts of 2012 on CNXSoft Blog

This is the last day of the year, so it’s probably a good time to look back and see what interested people on this blog. This has been a banner year for low cost ARM devices and boards starting with the Raspberry Pi, then MK802 and the new mini PCs / HDMI TV dongles / PCs-on-a-stick (whatever you want to call them) that came after, always cheaper and faster. Those low cost devices have in turn made people really interested in ARM Linux, and lots of development on those little devices and boards started. The top 10 posts of 2012, according to page views, reflect just those trends: 74 USD AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 Mini PC (May 2012) – MK802 started the whole “low cost mini PCs” craze, and drove the most traffic to this blog this year. People got excited about the price, form factor, and the possibility to […]

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