CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

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, open source, git, Raspberry Pi, UEFI, and much more.

You can download LCA 2013 videos in MP4 or OGV formats.

Via H-Online

FOSDEM is a 2-day (or 3 if you include Friday beer event) event where over 5,000 members of open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate. It’s free to attend, and there’s no registration, so you just show up to attend. FOSDEM 2013 takes place on Feb 2-3 (yep, this week-end) in Brussels

There are 7 main tracks where sessions are organized:

• Operating systems
• Open source challenges
• Security Janson
• Beyond operating systems
• Web development
• Miscellaneous
• Robotics

There are also keynotes and devroom for a total of 488 sessions. Developers rooms that may particularly be of interest to readers of this blog are:

• Cross Desktop devroom – e.g. Wayland, gstreamer, razor-qt, Qt Project, Plasma Active, etc…
• Cross Distro devroom – e.g. Linux on Android, suse on ARM, ARMv8, systemd, etc…
• Embedded and mobile devroom – e.g. Baserock Embedded Linux, Guacamayo (Yocto), Nemo Mobile/ Mer project, arduino…

All in all that’s a lot of sessions, and even though I won’t attend, I’m going to select a few from the main tracks:

• Saturday 13:00 – 13:50 – Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems by Jon Masters

This talk introduces the Fedora ARM Project and in particular the work we are doing to bring Fedora to emerging 64-bit ARM server systems.

• Saturday 15:00 – 15:50 – Open ARM GPU drivers by Luc Verhaegen

Where are we today, one year after the unveiling of the Lima driver. This talk will cover the Lima driver (ARM Mali 200/400), but also other open source GPU driver projects such as the freedreno driver (Qualcomm Adreno), open source driver for Nvidia Tegra, etnaviv project (Vivante GC) and cover the status for Broadcoms Videocore and Imaginations PowerVR GPUs.

• Saturday 16:00 – 16:50 – ARM support in the Linux kernel by Thomas Petazzoni

Based on the speaker’s experience of getting the support for the new Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM processors from Marvell into the mainline Linux kernel, this talk will detail the most important steps involved in this effort, and through this, give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support.

• Sunday 11:00 – 11:50 – Firefox OS by Jonas Sicking

Firefox OS is the next product being developed by Mozilla. It’s an open source OS based on the web and following the principals which have made the web a success. A phone running recent builds of Firefox OS (it’s not a finished product yet) will be demoed, and  the technologies and ideas behind Firefox OS will be discussed.

• Sunday 12:00 – 12:50 – systemd, Two Years Later by Lennart Poettering

The systemd project is now two years old (almost three). It found adoption as the core of many big community and commercial Linux distributions. It’s time to look back what we achieved, what we didn’t achieve, how we dealt with the various controversies, and what’s to come next.

• Sunday 12:00 12:50 – Aldebaran Robotics and Open Source by Dimitri Merejkowsky

How Aldebaran Robotics is using open source on their NAO robot.

• Sunday 13:00 – 13:50 – ROS: towards open source in robotics by Morgan Quigley

This talk will provide an overview of the Robot Operating System (ROS), an open software integration framework for robots.

• Sunday 14:00 – 14:50 – Vroom! Free Software in your car by Jeremiah Foster

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and how it has met the challenges along the way.

• Sunday 16:00 – 16:50 – UEFI SecureBoot by Cathy Malmrose

What, why, when, where and how SecureBoot changes the way we build F/LOSS

Mozilla has just announced an entry level developer phone for Firefox OS based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 processor, 512 MB RAM, and 4GB Flash. You may think the specs are quite poor, but this actually makes sense since Firefox OS is initially destined at emerging markets.

Here are the full specifications of  this smartphone (Codenamed Keon):

• CPU – Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 1Ghz
• System Memory – 512 MB RAM
• Storage – 4GB Flash + microSD slot
• Display – 3.5″ HVGA Multitouch
• Network – UMTS 2100/1900/900 (3G HSPA), GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (2G EDGE)
• Camera – 3 MP rear camera
• Misc – Wifi N, Light and proxmity Sensor, G-Sensor, GPS, MicroUSB
• Battery – 1580 mAh

The phone supports over the air updates, and comes unlocked, so you can simply add your own SIM card. These developer phones are being developed by Geeksphone in partnership with Telefonica.

If you don’t have the developer phone yet, you can still get started by running Firefox OS Simulator in your desktop web browser, or install Firefox OS on your own Android 4.0 or greater smartphone.

A faster smartphone is also in the work as Liliputing also reports that:

Geeksphone says there’s also a second model called the Peak which will feature a 4.3 inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, a more powerful 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, an 8MB rear camera, 512MB of RAM, and an 1800 mAh battery.

Both Keon and Peak preview phones should be available to developers from February. Mozilla also announced Firefox OS App Days that take place in over 20 locations around the world to promote the platform and help developers getting started with Firefox OS.

Oleg Romashin, a Nokia engineer, has been working on porting Firefox OS (previously known as Boot 2 Gecko) to the Raspberry Pi, and has uploaded a YouTube video showing a Firefox OS running on the device, including a WebGL teapot demo running at 60 fps. This Firefox OS build is based on Debian Squeezy, with plain EGL rendering, no Widget Toolkit backends and no X11. Some parts do not look very smooth yet, but this demo looks promising.

If you want to try it yourself, you can download the WebGL teapot build. Mozilla patches with LinuxGL widget backend are also available at http://hg.mozilla.org/users/romaxa_gmail.com/embedipc_queue/file/linuxglpure. If you have the N9 smartphone or Beagleboard, it looks like you can also try this. Check files in  http://romaxa.info/b2g/.

Mozilla announced it would rename its Boot 2 Gecko (B2G) HTML5 mobile operating system to Firefox OS, and that ZTE and TCL (under the Alcatel brand) would manufacture the first devices running Firefox OS using Qualcomm Snapdragon Processors. The first devices should be available early 2013, at first in Brazil through Vivo, Telefónica’s commercial brand.

The company also said that telecom operators such as Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Telenor are planning to sell Firefox OS based smartphones.

The platform is said to be optimized for entry-level smartphones thanks to the removal of unnecessary middleware layers among other things. This should allow mobile operators to provide low-cost handsets with “richer experiences” for the developing markets.

Firefox OS will be fully open source and the reference implementation of the required Web APIs is being submitted to W3C for standardization.

Internally, the project still appears to be referred to as Boot to Gecko and you can build and run B2G in the emulator, Samsung Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S2 or Samsung Galaxy Nexus.