Banana Pi M2 Ultra Allwinner R40 Development Board with SATA & GbE Sells for $46

Allwinner-R40-development-board

Allwinner A10 and A20 processors have been quite popular in the past since they could handle Fast or Gigabit Ethernet and SATA natively, included decent multimedia capabilities, and were found in low-cost hardware such as Cubieboard 2 or MeLE A1000. Since then we’ve had a few boards with SATA using newer and faster processors without SATA IP, meaning it was usually implemented using a USB 2.0 to SATA bridge leading to mediocre to average performance depending on the implementation and selected bridge. Allwinner R40 is the successor of Allwinner R20 with a faster quad-core Cortex A7 processor, but keeping Gigabit Ethernet, SATA, and most features of its predecessor. The good news is that Banana Pi has now launched the promised M2 Ultra development board based on the new processor for $45.80 + shipping on Aliexpress (Total for me: $48.35). Banana Pi M2 Ultra specifications: SoC – Allwinner R40 quad-core ARM […]

Giveaway Week Winners – November 2016

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to announce the results the whole world is eagerly waiting for today, and as you’ve probably guessed it, by that I mean CNX Software Giveaway Week 2016 contest… obviously… We had seven winners sharing the prizes shown below from Android TV boxes, to a Linux TV stick, and an Android virtual reality headset. 2016 has been an interesting year so far, putting statisticians, pundits, pollsters, and generally speaking odds to shame, and random.org apparently decided to join that trends, as while most of the blog’s traffic – and I’d assume entries – come from the western world (North America / Western Europe), random.org mostly selected winners from other countries: VR SKY CX-V3 VR headset – Dainis, Latvia WeTek Core TV box – Homer, Morocco Vana Player Hifi Linux audio player – Fakham, Pakistan MeLE PCG02U Ubuntu TV stick – Ziggy, Singapore Coowell V4 Android tv […]

Orange Pi PC 2 Development Board based on Allwinner H5 SoC Launched for $20

Shenzhen Xunlong had already launched Orange Pi Zero, the cheapest ARM Linux board with networking you can find today, earlier this week, and I’ve just been informed the company has now listed the more powerful Orange Pi PC 2 board powered by Allwinner H5 quad core Cortex A53 processor on Aliexpress for $19.98 plus shipping.Orange Pi PC 2 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad core Cortex A53 processor with an ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – micro SD card slot up to 64GB, 8Mbit SPI NOR flash Video Output – HDMI 1.4 with CEC support, AV port Audio I/O – HDMI, AV port, on-board microphone Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet USB – 3x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG port Camera – MIPI CSI Interface Expansions – 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header Debugging – 3-pin UART header for serial console Misc – IR receiver; Power […]

Inforce Computing Introduces 6301 SoM and Devkit Powered by Snapdragon 410E SoC with Long Term Availability

Qualcomm launched Snapdragon 410E and 600E processors for the embedded market at the end of September, meaning the processors were easy to source by any company, not matter how small they are, and the company would now offer long term availability often required for embedded systems. Inforce Computing is now leveraging the new Snapdragon 410E processor with their Inforce 6301 micro SoM, and corresponding development kit. Inforce 6301 micro SoM specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 410E (APQ8016 SoC) quad core ARM Cortex A53 processor @ 1.2GHz, Adreno 306 GPU, and Hexagon DSP @ 700MHz Memory – 1GB LPDDR3 @ 533MHz  (Option: 2GB) Storage – 8GB eMMC v4.5 flash (Option up to 64GB) NAND, 1x micro SD card interface with support up to HS200 Connectivity – Bluetooth 4.1 LE, Wi-Fi dual stream 802.11 b/g/n @ 2.4GHz (WC3620), on-board GPS/GNSS/BeiDou/Galileo (WGR7640) Video – H.264/263 playback and capture @1080p; H.265 playback @720p; Interfaces […]

Giveaway Week – Star Cloud PCG02U Ubuntu TV Stick

The fourth device for this giveaway week will be MeLE Star Cloud PCG02U TV stick powered by Intel Atom Z3735F quad core processor, but instead of running Windows 10, the device is sold with Ubuntu 14.04, which I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04. I found out that the device was running pretty well (minus Bluetooth support) in my PCG02U review, and for the price at the time ($70) it was really a good deal. The device has even become the best selling devices on MeLE Aliexpress store, outselling all other Windows devices. However, MeLE ethics are questionable since they used Ian Morrison (Linuxium)’s image in their devices without giving any credits. The package will come with all accessories above, minus the “Caution Hot” sticker which must have gone to sticker heaven…. Simply leave a comment below to enter the draw. Other rules are as follows: Only one entry per contest. I […]

UP Squared Apollo Lake Development Board Comes with Up to 8GB RAM, 128 GB Storage for 89 Euros and Up (Crowdfunding)

Up-Squared-Board

AAEON Introduced a Intel Atom X5 based Raspberry Pi-like development board named “UP Board” last year that sold for as low as 89 Euros via a Kickstarter campaign. The company is now back with the first Apollo Lake development board for makers I’ve seen so far, powered by either a dual core Celeron N3350 or a quad core Pentium N4200 processor, featuring an Altera MAX 10 FPGA, and called UP2 (“UP Squared”). There are six variants of UP Squared board sharing most of the same technical specifications: SoC Intel Celeron N3350 dual core “Apollo Lake” processor @ 1.1 GHz / 2.4 GHz with 12 EU Intel HD graphics 500 @ 200 MHz / 650 MHz (6W TDP) Intel Pentium N4200 quad core “Apollo Lake” processor @ 1.1 GHz / 2.5 GHz with 18 EU Intel HD graphics 505 @ 200 MHz / 750 MHz (6W TDP) FPGA – Altera Max […]

Quirky Linux 8.1 Lightweight Linux Desktop Distribution Released for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3

Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux, may have retired from maintaining Puppy Linux a few years ago, but he appears to be still active, as he’s just released Quirky Linux 8.1 for Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 boards, a lightweight Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04, and including LibreOffice & Inkscape to have the same out of the box experience as Raspbian, but with a 360 MB download size instead of 1.3 GB for Raspbian. A build for ODROID-XU4 development board should also be coming soon. The image has been designed for 8GB micro SD card, and needs to extracted and dumped onto the card with the usual Win32DiskImager or dd tools. There are three mirrors for quirky-pi2-sd-8gb-xerus-8.1.img.xz firmware: iBiblio.org, nluug.nl, and archive.org. You can read the full release notes if you want more details. In case you don’t have a spare micro SD card, […]

Canonical Livepatch Service Automatically Updates Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (and later) with the Latest Kernel without Rebooting

Installing or upgrading packages in Linux distributions does not normally require rebooting your system, except for the Linux kernel and drivers. But since Linux 4.0 kernel, Live Kernel patching is possible, meaning Linux kernel updates can be performed without having to reboot your server or computer. Canonical is now taking advantage of this new feature with their Livepatch Service available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and greater. If you want to enable it on your machine, you’ll have to authenticate to Livepatch portal to get a key / token for the service as shown in the screenshot above. Now you can install the service:

and enable it with your token:

That’s it. Your can check Livepatch service status with the command:

In my case, an update was not necessary, but if there’s one you should see something like:

That way you can make sure your system always […]

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