ST Ericsson NovaThor Category - Page 5 of 6 - CNX Software

December 11, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

5th Linux BSP Release for Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the fifth version of the Linux BSP for the board and this version nearly fully support all features of the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/linaro/images/20111209/. ChangeLog since last release: Based on Linaro Ubuntu 11.11 desktop filesystem Accelerometer and barometer support for all board revisions GPS support Enhancements to the default kernel config (NFS, /proc/config.gz support) Enhanced display support Add support for new connectivity module versions Main supported features: Based on Linux 3.0.0 and the Linaro Ubuntu desktop file system HDMI/DVI-D display support Graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU Bluetooth support GPS support Ethernet and Wireless connectivity microSD card support Sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer) Limited USB OTG host functionality Features to be included in future releases: Multimedia acceleration Better USB OTG host support Known issues: USB OTG host mode is […]

December 9, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Metaio Releases Mobile Augmented Reality SDK

Yesterday Qualcomm released QCAR SDK 1.5 Beta, and today Metaio announces its Mobile SDK 3.0 for augmented reality application development on Android and iOS. The metaio Mobile SDK brings with it patented gravity-awareness and visual tracking technology for 2D and 3D objects, now three times more robust than the previous version. These features combined will ensure AR experiences that are more natural, more intuitive, and more realistic, says the company. Metaio recently announced formal collaborations with ARM, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments to fully take advantage of the GPU hardware provided by those companies and the Mobile SDK is optimized for ARM Mali GPU (both graphics and compute), ST Ericsson Nova and NovaThor mobile processors and TI OMAP processors. The metaio Mobile SDK also includes its own 3D rendering engine – now with advanced shader support – and a plugin to make use of Unity3D (3D game engine). You can watch […]

November 25, 2011November 25, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 11.11 Release with Kernel 3.1.1 and Android 4.0.1 Support

Linaro has just released version 11.11 based on Linux Kernel 3.1.1 and with support for Android ICS. The Android 4.0.1 Preview build for all low cost development boards supported by Linaro are available at http://releases.linaro.org/11.11/android/images-ics-preview/. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro’s baseline has now been upgraded to 2.3.7. The first Versatile Express Android build has been completed. Pandaboard and Vexpress has been upgraded to kernel 3.1.1. A preview of Ice Cream Sandwich is released and running on Snowball, Origen, iMX53 and on Pandaboard with Linaro kernels. A NEON-optimized libpng has been itegrated in all builds. Preliminary DS-5 support has been integrated. Preliminary WiFi support on Android Origen. Kernel config for each build is available on android-build page. USB Ethernet works on Origen. Camera recording function works on Pandaboard. USB camera can be hotplugged on Pandaboard. Developer Platform Firefox can now be cross-built using multiarch. Instructions are available […]

November 24, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Android 4.0 on ST Ericsson Snowball Development Board

Android 4.0.1 can now run on ST Ericsson Nova A9500 low cost development board “snowball”. The build is available at https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/staging-snowball/. You can Android 4 (ICS) it in action in the Snowball board in the video build using build number 84. This is a bit sluggish since Android 4 currently lacks hardware acceleration on this development board but Linaro and the igloocommunity will implement it in the next few weeks. If you have an ST Ericsson snowball board, here are the instructions to try the latest Android 4.0 build for the platform: Get the images: wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/boot.tar.bz2 wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/system.tar.bz2 wget –no-check-certificate https://android-build.linaro.org/jenkins/job/linaro-android_staging-snowball/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/out/target/product/snowball/userdata.tar.bz2 Get the linaro-image-tools and create the image: bzr branch lp:linaro-image-tools ./linaro-image-tools/linaro-android-media-create –mmc /dev/sdc –dev snowball_sd –system system.tar.bz2 –userdata userdata.tar.bz2 –boot boot.tar.bz2 MINICOM settings: minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -w -C minicom.txt You must setup the boot args as follows: U8500 $ setenv loadbootscript fat load mmc 1:1 ${loadaddr} […]

November 9, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro’s Android Platform – ELCE 2011

Zach Pfeffer, Linaro Android Platform team leader, describes Linaro’s work on the Android platform and future plans at Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2011. Abstract: Linaro uses components from the Android Open Source Project, member companies, community supported efforts and Linaro engineering teams to build integrated, easy-to-use and well tested Android platforms for upstream work, product baselines and hobby projects. The team currently has platforms for TIs PandaBoard, BeagleBoard and Beagle xM, ST Ericsson’s Snowball, Samsung’s Origen and Freescale’s iMX53. They recently released platforms with Android 2.3.4 built against GCC 4.6 and running the 3.0 Linux kernel. In this session Zach reviews what’s been done, the Linaro Android concept, how Linaro brings Android together and what their plans are. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later […]

November 8, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

ARM Linux Kernel Alignment & Benefits For Snowball – ELCE 2011

Andrea Gallo, Chief Linux Architect in the Smartphone and Tablet Solution organization in ST-Ericsson and part of the Linaro Technical Steering Committee, explains how a common Linux ARM kernel benefits ST Ericsson Snowball development platform. Abstract: Last March, the ARM Linux community got shaken by the complaints by Linus Torvalds for its lack of proper structure and organization. This is totally true and mainly due to the large number of different SoC vendors, each one integrating the ARM IP’s in a slightly different variant. Linaro immediately accepted the challenge to drive the kernel alignment of the ARM community and most ARM Linux experts got together and agreed on the way forward as early as May 2011 at the Developers’ summit in Budapest. ST-Ericsson is a founding member of Linaro and some key ST-Ericsson engineers are assigned to Linaro and specifically to this kernel alignment working force. In the speech, Andrea […]

November 4, 2011November 4, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro 11.10 Release with Linux Kernel 3.1

Linaro has just released version 11.10 based on Linux Kernel 3.1. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Audio playback and recording works on LEB-panda. TJBench into all Android builds benchmarked against the original Android libjpeg implementation: TomGall/LibJpegTurbo All strict-aliasing violations in 2.3.5 have been fixed and sent to AOSP. (for build optimization) Linaro Gerrit is integrated with Android Build Service for change verification as part of Continuous Integration effort. Tip toolchain tracked and released against all targets for 11.10. iMX53 will now boot with a 3.0 or later Android Kernel. The multimedia test application has been extended to cover encoding and give better benchmark results. Linaro’s Android distribution can now base builds off a tip toolchain build. Linaro’s 11.09 toolchain has been benchmarked. USB camera (UVC) now works on linaro-android builds. Developer Platform The Linux Linaro packages are now generated and validated in a continuous integration loop. New […]

October 13, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

New Android 2.3.4 Release For ST Ericsson Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the second version of Android 2.3.4 for the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/android/images/20111012/ for V3 and V5 boards. Here are the new features and main bug fixes for this release: GPS support enabled WiFi instabilities fixed and enabled in the UI The browser home page crash is gone and the known issues: Audio recording does not work Potrait mode does not work (rotating the device corrupts screen until rotated back) The phone app crashes (no modem support) The flashing instructions are available at http://www.igloocommunity.org/support/Flashing_howto Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com