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Linux 3.2 Release

Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.2 on the 4th of January: So 3.2 is out, and the merge window for 3.3 is thus officially open. I delayed 3.2 first a few days to wait for the final linux-next (“final” in the sense that that’s what I’ll fetch to decide whether something has been in linux-next for 3.3 or not), and then some more as people were coming back from holidays and sorting out some regressions. So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes. Still, there’s not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, I’m feeling pretty happy about it. Linus Linux 3.1 added support for OpenRISC,  Near-Field Communication (NFC) and new power tuning tools called cpupowerutils, as well as support for Xilinx boards and i.MX53 ARD. Linux 3.2 […]

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Video Demo of XMBC on Raspberry Pi

XMBC is a free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. Some people are currently working on porting it to the Raspberry Pi board. They posted a video demo on their forum and I uploaded the video to YouTube for those interested in seeing the progress. The video just shows XMBC booting, then accessing the menu and showing the Videocore GPU is detected. This is still work in progress, but it looks promising.

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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KT Keep In Touch Android Tablets

I’ve recently discovered some low cost tablets in one of the computer centers in Chiang Mai manufactured by a Thai company (SEC Intertech Thailand Co. Ltd) and sold under the “KT Keep In Touch” brand. They have their own shop in the center and sell exclusively those tablets as well as SD cards and 3G dongles. The prices range between 7,900 Baht to 9,900 Baht for 7″ Android 2.2 and 2.3 tablets, that’s equivalent to 250 USD to 315 USD. Those prices include VAT and all sort of custom duties that you may not get when you buy in other countries like the US, that means retail prices are usually 30 to 40% more expensive in Thailand compared to the US. The seller also had a 10″ tablet, but he looked like he did not want to show it to me as it was the an older model with resistive […]

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Linux for Cortex M3 & M4 Microcontrollers

There are plenty of low cost Linux development boards based on Cortex A8 or A9 such as the Beaglebone, as well as some devkits based on ARM7 and ARM9 such as SAM9 development kits , but if your application is cost and/or energy sensitive you can also switch to micro-controllers using Cortex M3 or M4 based development boards such as Emcraft SmartFusion devkits. You can run a functional uCLinux system with 1MB of RAM and 1MB of flash including the TCP/IP stack. You need to use uClinux and not directly Linux, because the Cortex M3 doess not have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) and only a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This can bring some interesting software development challenges such as (apparently random) kernel panics, the lack of fork, memory fragmentation and more. You can check out http://kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/uclibc/Glibc_vs_uClibc_Differences.txt for the main differences between uClibc and Glibc. The instructions to patch and […]

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Linaro 11.12 Release with Kernel 3.1.5

Linaro has just released version 11.12 based on Linux Kernel 3.1.5 and further support for Android 4.0 including graphics hardware acceleration on Snowball and Origen development boards. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro ICS is built with the Linaro toolchain. Linaro ICS is running on all supported boards. DS-5 with Gator is supported in all Linaro Andoid ICS builds. The latest version of libpng (1.5.7) has been integrated in Linaro ICS. An AOSP master build is now available from linaro. ARM® Mali™ Hardware Accelerated Graphics is supported on Origen and Snowball. libjpeg-turbo has been integrated into all Andoid ICS builds. Developer Platform The linux-linaro and lt-panda kernel packages are now automatically generated by the CI build scripts DS-5 with Gator is supported in all Ubuntu LEB builds. XBMC packages, with Gstreamer and OpenGLES support, are now available at the Ubuntu Overlay (supporting only Panda initially) U-Boot-Linaro is […]

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Archos 70b Internet Tablet: 199 USD Android 3.2 Tablet

Archos announced the 199 USD Archos 70b Internet Tablet (Archos 70b IT) , a 7″ Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) based on a 1.2GHz processor (probably OMAP3630) with 512 MB RAM, and offers a 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, 8GB of storage, HDMI output, and support for Google apps and Android Marketplace. Archos product naming is rather confusing, as they also have an Archos 70b running Android 2.1. So if you go shopping for the new device, make sure it reads Archos 70b Internet Tablet and not just Archos 70b. The Archos 70b IT is an enhanced version of the Archos 70 G8(Generation 8). The CPU (OMAP3630 Cortex-A8 processor) clock rate has been boosted from 1GHz to 1.2GHz, RAM has doubled to 512MB, the resolution resolution has increased to 1024×600 (was 800×480) and the price has dropped to 199 USD from 275 USD.  Other features remain the same, as the tablet features […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Nvidia Announces CARMA Tegra 3 CUDA Development Kit

Nvidia has just unveiled its Tegra 3 development kit, the Nvidia CARMA. The development kit codename has been crowdsourced as Nvidia asked its followers to propose a name and vote for the best name. This development kit particularly targets CUDA, Nvidia parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU). The CARMA hardware has been designed by Seco and features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM Cortex A9 Quad-Core CPU and NVIDIA CUDA GPU QuatroTM. Here are the technical specs for the development kit: CPU NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad-Core ARM A9 GPU NVIDIA QuadroTM 1000M with 96 CUDA Cores Memory • CPU Memory: 2 GB • GPU Memory: 2 GB Peak Performance 270 Single Precision GFlops CPU – GPU Interface PCIe x4 Gen1 link Network 1x Gigabit Ethernet Storage 1x SATA Connector USB 3x USB 2.0 Display […]

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Copy/Paste Text between Windows XP Host and Ubuntu Guest in VirtualBox

I’ve recently upgraded the amount of memory and graphics card in my computer to order to be able to smoothly run virtual machines and support 2 monitors. So instead of using dual boot for Windows XP and Ubuntu, I’m now running Ubuntu in VirtualBox. One thing, I wanted to do is to copy text from the right screen (e.g. Instructions in Web Browser in Windows XP) to the left screen where I have Ubuntu 11.10 running in VirtualBox. This does not work right out of the (virtual)box however. The procedure to enable “Shared Clipboard” is straightforward. First, you need to install the guest additions. While Ubuntu is running, click on “Devices->Install Guest Additions” in VirtualBox top menu, this will start the installation in Ubuntu, simply enter you root password until the installation completes. Restart Ubuntu and you should now be able to copy/paste text between the host and guest machines. […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs