ubuntu News - Page 177 of 187 - CNX Software

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 19, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

ARM vs x86 Servers Benchmark – Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 vs Intel Xeon E3-1240

Calxeda has released the results of ApacheBench benchmark comparing their ARM-based EnergyCore solution to an Intel Xeon server in order to showcase the performance and the much lower power consumption of their servers. Here’s the setup: Hardware: Single Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 @ 1.1 GHz, 4 GB of DDR3L-1066 memory, 1Gb Ethernet network port and 250 GB SATA 7200rpm HDD Intel Xeon E3-1240 @ 3.3 GHz, 16 GB memory and 1Gb Ethernet network port. No info on hard drive provided Software: Ubuntu Server v12.04 Apache Server v2.4.2 ApacheBench v2.3 (16k request size) They performed power measurements every 2 seconds and averaged the results. Power supply overhead and hard drive power consumption were not excluded in the measurement, but the entire SoC and DDR memory power consumption were included together. For the Intel server however, they could not measure directly, so they used published TDP values for the CPU (80 W) and I/O […]

June 14, 2012June 18, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Collabora and Fluendo Release GStreamer SDK 2012.5 Amazon

Last week, Collabora and Fluendo jointly announced the release of an open source software development kit (SDK ) for GStreamer multimedia framework. The SDK aims at easing the integration of Gstreamer into projects and provides a pre-built version of the framework which is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. GStreamer is used in many Linux applications such as media players (Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok), video editors (PitiVi), and media centers such as XBMC among other applications. It’s also often the framework used to play videos on ARM platforms with implementations for OMAP 4/5 and devices compliant with the OpenMAX standard. Gstreamer website has also been updated and provides links to download GStreamer SDK and documentation on the home page. The new documentation looks pretty good with fives main sections: Instructions for installing the SDK on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora), Windows or Mac OS. 11 basic and 2 advanced tutorials. […]

June 13, 2012May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 81 Comments

Hardware Packs for AllWinner A10 Devices and Easier Method to Create a Bootable Ubuntu 12.04 SD Card

Linaro has a tool called linaro-media-create to install Linaro Ubuntu to an SD card by passing the device, hardware pack file, the rootfs and the board as arguments. Hardware packs are files that contains hardware specific binaries and configs files (e.g. bootloader, kernel…). I’ve done something similar (albeit more basic) for AllWinner A10 devices so that you can easily install and run Ubuntu (and possibly other distributions) on an SD card. I’ve written 2 scripts for this: a10-hwpack-bld.sh – Script to generate evb.bin, build the latest u-boot and linux kernel, retrieve some config files and compress all this in an hardware pack file a1x-media-create.sh – Script to make a bootable SD card for AllWinner A10 devices. You can get the scripts with git:

git clone git://github.com/cnxsoft/a10-tools.git

1	git clone git://github.com/cnxsoft/a10-tools.git

I’ve only tested it with Mele A1000, but if you have other A10 devices such as MK802 mini PC or MINI X media player, it should […]

June 8, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

How To Create and Seed a Torrent in Ubuntu Using Transmission Command Line

You may have a server with limited (free) monthly bandwidth, but yet need to share some large files or files that need to be accessed by a large number of people. Instead of sharing your files via your HTTP server, you can share them via BitTorrent instead in order to hopefully save bandwidth. Here are the steps I followed on Ubuntu 11.10, but they should work with any version of Ubuntu, Debian and Mint. Install transmission client and daemon

sudo apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-daemon

1	sudo apt-get install transmission-cli transmission-daemon

Create a directory to share your files and .torrent files

mkdir ~/p2p

1	mkdir ~/p2p

Copy your file in that directory and create the torrent file with transmission-cli

transmission-create ubuntu.bin.7z -t udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80

1	transmission-create ubuntu.bin.7z -t udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80

Start transmission-daemon

transmission-daemon -c ~/p2p

1	transmission-daemon -c ~/p2p

That’s all your need to do. If you want to monitor transmission remotly via a web interface, you can instead run transmission-daemon as follows: transmission-daemon -c ~/p2p -a public_ip Where public_ip is the public ip of your computer. Alternatively, you could also […]

June 6, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Mitac Unveils ARM Based GFX Server at Computex 2012

MiTAC International announced their first ARM server (MiTAC GFX) based on Marvell ARMADA XP SoC and running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS at Computex 2012, in Taipei. This solution appears to be similar to Dell “Copper” ARM server announced last week, which also uses Marvel ARMADA XP and runs Ubuntu 12.04, except its intended to be a real product rather than just a prototype. The MiTAC GFX with ASX-1 module is intended for deployment as a general purpose server where real estate, efficiency and throughput at a realistic price are key factors and typical applications include web hosting, web browsing, email, chat, social media and networking, etc. Later, MiTAC will introduce an ASX-HP (High Performance) module for compute intensive workloads that can be add to GFX system, and ASX modules featuring 64-bit SoC are under development. MiTAC showcased a GFX System with 64 nodes (that’s 256 Cortex A9 cores) at Computex 2012, […]

June 5, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

How To Let Sudo Insult You When You Type the Wrong Password

This is a completely useless post, but it’s possible to configure sudo to return insults instead of the default error message when you type the wrong password. To enable this feature, edit /etc/sudoers (with visudo for example) and change the line:

Defaults    env_reset

1	Defaults env_reset

to :

Defaults    env_reset,insults

1	Defaults env_reset,insults

Open a terminal windows as a normal user, type a command with sudo and input the wrong password. Here are a few examples: $ sudo bash [sudo] password for testman: xxx Are you on drugs? [sudo] password for testman: xxx Maybe if you used more than just two fingers… [sudo] password for testman: xxx Listen, burrito brains, I don’t have time to listen to this trash. [sudo] password for testman: xxx You silly, twisted boy you. [sudo] password for testman: xxx What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what? [sudo] password for testman: xxx You do that again and see what happens… [sudo] […]

June 1, 2012June 1, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linaro 12.05 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.05 based on Linux Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4. This release provides lots of improvement for Origen (Samsung Exynos 4) on Android, further work has been done on big.LITTLE processing and ARMv8 work appears to have started for Ubuntu and Debian. armel vs armhf benchmarks show a massive improvement (up to 15x) when using armhf for povray (3D rendering),. but for most other tests, there is little improvement, and in some rare cases armhf is slightly slower than armel. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Created a stable Google hangout build for Origen Updated DS-5 and gator daemon to 5.10 Stress tests from big.LITTLE testing have been integrated into LAVA Completed big.LITTLE Android tasks Monkeyrunner tests for automating common Android usage have been integrated into LAVA Ordered a new power measurement device from National Instruments Updated and Origen 3.4 rc7 Completed Android HAL […]