ubuntu News - Page 176 of 187 - CNX Software

July 14, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

WiFi Tank Based on EEE PC, Arduino, Ubuntu and Node.js

Eight computer and electrical engineers built a WiFi Tank (Node.js robot) as part of a senior design project at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts. The robot brain is an EEE PC running Ubuntu, together with an Arduino board and is programmed using node.js. Each tank is equipped with a camera and 2 customized Wi-Fi repeaters (which it can drop it extend range), and it’s targeted at military operations or disaster-affected areas where network infrastructure is not available. Here are the key characteristics of this robot Robot controlled over WiFi 102 cm long, 71 cm wide, 41 cm tall, about 68 kg. Custom-built (except for treads) out of aluminum Range: 1 km with one on-board router and two droppable long-range repeater modules Running time: ~12 hours On-board webcam with microphone, night vision, pan and tilt On-board GPS for location tracking Custom-made remote user interface, works on any device with a web […]

July 11, 2012July 11, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

HardKernel ODroid-X: Low Cost Exynos 4412 Quad Core Cortex A9 Development Board

HardKernel unveiled the ODROID-X development board based on Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 with quad core Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB Low Power DDR2 and storage is done via SD card and/or eMMC flash. Here are ODROID-X development board specifications: Processor Samsung Exynos4412 Cortex-A9 Quad Core 1.4Ghz with 1MB L2 cache Memory 1024MB(1GB) LP-DDR2 800MB/s data rate GPU Quad Core Mali-400 Video supports 1080p via HDMI cable (H.264+AAC based MP4 container format) Video Out micro HDMI connector / RGB-24bit LCD interface port Audio Standard 3.5mm headphone jack and microphone jack HDMI SPDIF LAN 10/100Mbps Ethernet with RJ-45 Jack (Auto-MDIX support) USB2.0 Host High speed standard A type connector x 6 ports USB2.0 Device ADB/Mass storage(Micro USB) UART System console monitoring for development (1.8volt interface) IO PORTs 50pin IO expansion port for LCD/I2C/UART/SPI/ADC/GPIO interfaces Display (Option) HDMI monitor / LCD panel with RGB or LVDS interface Storage (Option) Full size SDHC […]

July 10, 2012July 10, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Boston Ships Viridis ARM Server Based on Calxeda EnergyCore Cortex A9 SoC

At the end of 2011, Boston, a British IT company, announced plans for an ARM server based on Calxeda Quad Core Cortex A9 Server-on-Chip, and now the company recently announced they started to ship the server (called Viridis) to their first customers. We now have further details about the server including the key features: Ten times the performance at the same power in the same space Cut energy and space by 90% Easily scalable to thousands of nodes 48 SoC devices delivered across 12 Calxeda EnergyCard modules Each EnergyCore SoC contains an ARM quadcore processing unit, providing a total of 192 cores per 2U enclosure Low power consumption: <300W with each SoC consuming between 0.5 to 5W depending on the load. Up to 24 SATA HDDs or SSD devices Up to 192GB of RAM per 2U enclosure A Calxeda EnergyCard (pictured below) features 4 Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 SoC which can […]

July 6, 2012July 6, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Quick Binary Debugging in Linux with Strace System Call Tracer

I’ve recently come across strace, a debugging utility for Linux that “monitor the system calls used by a program and all the signals”. It may not be that useful if you have the source code and can run other debugging tools such as gdb, or simply add printf to your code. But if you don’t have source code of the program, or you are a system administrator who wants to check if the program fails due to file access reasons, for example, this is really a great tool as it may help you find out which file causes problem. In my case, I was trying OpenGL ES on an ARM platform, and at least part of the code comes in libraries that are only available in binary form. I got the following error message running es2_info (part of mesa-utils-extra): UMP: ump_arch_open() failed to open UMP device driver ********************************************************************* ERROR: In […]

July 4, 2012July 5, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Amahi 6.1 for Ubuntu 12.04 Released

Amahi has just announced the release of Amahi 6.1, Ubuntu Edition, an Home Digital Assistant (HDA). Amahi used to only work for Fedora and this is their very first stable release for Ubuntu 12.04. The key features of Amahi 6.1, Ubuntu Edition include: Greyhole 0.9 (storage pooling technology) Reliability fixes and updates New look Support for 32 / 64-bit Desktop and Server versions of Ubuntu Improved cloud storage with Amahi Sync Preliminary support ARM platforms such as PandaBoard and BeagleBoard One-Click App installs via Amahi’s application store If you want to get started with Amahi, you’ll have to register (and get an install code), and follow a few command line instructions. The instructions are the same to install on ARM platforms (assuming you already have Ubuntu 12.04 running), but Amahi developers recommend to install it to an hard drive instead of an SD card for performance reasons. They are also […]

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

webOS Community Edition Release for HP TouchPad

Open webOS 1.0 is planned to be released in September 2012, but in the meantime, the development team has released an intermediate webOS “Community Edition” for the HP TouchPad. This code is different from the Open webOS project, and is composed of additional components from the current release of webOS for the TouchPad. The open webOS project team has been working with WebOS Internals to bring this release out for legacy TouchPad devices. Thanks to the release of the webOS Community Edition, it is now possible to learn how the TouchPad works, modify your TouchPad experience and then apply that to Open webOS 1.0 once it is released. The Community Edition only supports HP TouchPad, whereas Open webOS 1.0 release will enable the community to port webOS to different hardware platform, and add more features by using open source stacks such as BlueZ bluetooth and GStreamer. You’ll need to download […]

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, 2012February 3, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Migrating a WordPress Blog from Apache2 to Nginx

This blog is hosted on a Linode VPS with 512 MB RAM and running Ubuntu 11.10. Up until today, Apache2 was the web server, and it worked fine except sometimes, it reached connection and memory limits, and the blog would go offline for a short period of time, especially right after a new blog post. So this week-end, I decided to switch to nginx (pronounced engine-x) web server which is said to use less memory than Apache2. Let me know if something suddenly stopped working… nginx is a relatively recent web server, and the documentation on the web seems to become outdated pretty fast, so I’ve decided to document what I’ve done. The first thing I would recommend is to try it in your own local server first, and make sure most things are working including plugins. Testing your WordPress blog with nginx in a local server I run Ubuntu […]