Measy U2C Gets Finless ROM and PicUntu Support

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Measy U2C, a Rockchip RK3066 mini PC with a webcam using the stock Android firmware. Since then other people received the device, and started to work on improving it notably by releasing a Finless ROM and providing instructions to install PicUbuntu on the device. Bob Finless is Freaktab.com administrator., and he has released popular custom ROM for the most commonly RK3066 mini PCs, and this time it’s Measy U2C turn! Measy U2C Finless ROM This first custom ROM is based on the latest ROM released on Geekbuying (March 1st, 2013) that fixes the CPU frequency, and let the device now achieve 9200 Antutu score. The Finless ROM brings the following improvements: Fully rooted with the latest SU and SUperUser.apk. All Google apps updated to latest, except Google Search. Deleted unusable and junk apps. Cleaned up the file system with tune2fs. Increased “system” space for […]

FXI Technologies Cotton Candy HDMI Stick To Fully Support Both Android and Ubuntu

FXI Technologies was the first company to ever show an HDMI TV dongle when they unveiled the Cotton Candy in November 2011. Since then, many Chinese companies started to provide similar products at lower cost, and the company further improved the Cotton Candy, which is still powered by Exynos 4210 (dual core Cortex A9), by making it even smaller, and getting rid of the internal flash in the process. As a memory refresher, here are the specifications of the Cotton Candy: SoC – Samsung Exynos 4210 dual core Cortex A9 + Mali-400MP4 System Memory – 1GB DRAM Storage – No flash, up to 64GB microSD Video Output – HDMI Connectibity Wifi 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR USB – USB 2.0 male connector for power and connection to devices that supports USB mass storage + microUSB Video Codecs- 480p/720p/1080p Decode of MPEG4-SP/H.263/H.264 AVC/MPEG-2/VC1 Audio Codecs –  MP3, AAC, AAC+, Real Audio […]

Ubuntu 11.10 on GK802/Hi802 mini PC with 2D/3D and Video Hardware Acceleration

You may remember an Ubuntu 11.10 image was released via Geekbuying early January, but this image would not boot on my Hi802, lacked 2D/3D acceleration, and to my knowledge there hasn’t been any update since then. So hope of proper Linux support on the device was fading, until the community discovered Freescale released patches for i.mx6 HDMI dongles, developers setup the imx6-dongle community, and after a lot of work, mainly by three members: Jasbir, Dmitriy (rz2k) and James, there’s now GPU and VPU support on Ubuntu 11.10. Here’s a summary of the current status: Wifi working. External SD working Matched IOMUX configuration to align with the Android image. Stripped out unnecessary device initialisation from the original HDMI dongle source. Enabled EGL and GLES HW Acceleration in Ubuntu. Unity desktop might be partially HW accelerated (TBC) Jasbir uploaded a video to YouTube to show the progress, and it looks pretty good. […]

How to Run Android Apps in Linux with AndroVM

You may want to run some Android applications in your computer. If you’re using Windows, there’s already a decent option with Bluestacks. If you’re using Linux, you could always install the Android SDK and run the emulator, but I don’t really like this option because of the user interface, and for people who don’t need to use the SDK it’s not really the simplest thing to install. The way to run Android apps in Linux is probably to run an x86 Android virtual machine in VirtualBox. Yesterday, I tried the latest development version of Android x86 4.2, but for some reasons I could not control the mouse, and had to perform all tasks with the keyboard. What I’m going to use today instead is AndroVM, an Android VM for x86 processor, that is even more easy to use than the Android x86 image. The instructions has been performed in a […]

Linaro 13.02 Release with Linux Kernel 3.8 and Android 4.2.2

Linaro 13.02 is now available, and features Linux Kernel 3.8 and Android 4.2.2. The biggest news this month is probably the first release of a preliminary ARM64 Debian/Ubuntu Raring image. Other noticeable items include work on ARMv7 KVM, more improvements to OpenEmbedded ARMv8 implementation, as well as big.LITTLE MP implementation, and some modifications to the toolchain for Cortex A7 support. Origen images are not available for download this month, and there’s still no ALIP images since they have disappeared since Linaro upgraded to Ubuntu Quantal. Here are the highlights of this release: Android AOSP master build for Galaxy Nexus has been setup All the platforms have been updated to 4.2.2 Support for lava-test-shell has been added to linaro-android-build-tools. Developer Platform CI bring up: ARMv7 KVM – Add Arndale hypervisor patch to u-boot-linaro. CI bring up: Arndale – Add Arndale image reports to LAVA, Enable and verify UEFI support in the […]

AllWinner Announces A31s Processor for Phablets, Hints about Ubuntu Devices

AllWinner is currently a Mobile World Congress 2013, and Charbax had the chance to interview Eva, manager at AllWinner, and learn more about new processors, and future plans by the company. They spent some time discussing about AllWinner A31 and AllWinner A20 quad and dual Cortex A7 processors, but since we’ve know about those for a while I’ll skip this part. The most interesting part is about AllWinner A31s, a cost down version of A31, specifically designed for phablets (smartphones with 5″ to 7″ screens). Like AllWinner A31, AllWinner A31s is also a quad core Cortex A7 processor with PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU (8 shader engines) and the following specifications: CPU – ARM Cortex-A7 Quad-Core with 256KB L1-Cache/1MB L2-Cache GPU – POWERVR SGX 544MP2 with 8 logic cores. OpenGL ES2.0, Open CL1.x and DX 9_3 compliant. Memory 32-bit Dual-Channel LPDDR2/DDR3/DDR3L Controller, 8-bit NAND FLASH Controller with 64-bit ECC Video UHD H.264 […]

F9 Android Set-Top Box Features Samsung Exynos 4412 Processor

Geekbuying just announced they would be soon selling a tiny Android set-top box powered by Samsung Exynos 4412 quad core processor. This media player will come with 1 to 2 GB RAM, 8G to 16G flash, and run Android 4.0 (ICS), upgradeable to Android 4.1 or 4.2. Here are the specifications of this device: SoC – Samsung Quad Core Cortex-A9 Exynos 4412 @ 1.6GHZ + Mali-400 Quad Core GPU System Memory – 1GB RAM (optionally 2G) Storage – 8GB flash (optionally 16GB) + microSD slot Connectivity – WIFI 802.11 b/g/n Video Output – HDMI Audio Codec – MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, OGG, WAV, etc. Video Containers – AVI, MKV(XVID/px/H.264), MOV, TS, M2TS, RM/RMVB, FLV, 3GP, MPEG, DAT, MP4 USB – 2x USB 2.0 Power Supply – 5V/2A Weight – 109g The device will come with an HDMI cable, a power adapter, a 2.4Ghz remote control, and a user guide. Geekbuying […]

Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview Is Now Available for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4, 7 and 10 Devices

As promised with the announcement of Ubuntu on Tablets, Canonical released a developer preview of Ubuntu 12.10 for smartphones and tablets that can be installed in Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones, as well as Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. It is an experimental development snapshot that could potentially brick your device. Many features are still not available but you should be able to access the following: Shell and core applications Connection to the GSM network (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4) Phone calls and SMS (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4) Networking via Wifi Functional camera (front and back) Device accessible through the Android Developer Bridge tool (adb) You’ll be able to reinstall Android after trying it out, but all your data will be lost, unless you use apps such as Titanium Backup. The instructions to install Ubuntu 12.10 Touch are available on Canonical website, and you’ll basically […]

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