The Android Builders Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference took place on February 13-17 2012, in San Francisco. The Linux Foundation has now posted videos of the talks as well as presentation slides on their website. Android Builder Summit 2012 Buildbot and Gerrit Integration, Improved CI Automation Using Android Outside the Mobile Phone Space The Android Ecosystem Case Study of Android Ice Cream Sandwich Rapid Bringup Towards a Standard Audio HAL for Android Topics in Designing An Android Sensor Subsystem: Pitfalls and Considerations A Novel Approach to In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) Based on Android Android Services Black Magic The Case For Security Enhanced (SE) Android Hardware and Android App Testing & Tuning Exposing the Android Camera Stack Usable Hardware Security for Android on ARM devices Using OpenOCD JTAG in Android Kernel Debugging The AllJoyn Open Source Project ADB: (Android Debug Bridge) : How It Works Android OTA Software Updates USB Device […]
Canonical Brings Ubuntu Desktop to Multi-Core Android Smartphones
Canonical is pushing to move Ubuntu beyond Desktop PC, and we’ve already seen some mockups for Ubuntu Smartphones and the recent Ubuntu TV announcement. The Ubuntu smartphone is not there yet, but Canonical has another idea: running Ubuntu Desktop on your multi-core Android smartphone connected to a TV/Monitor via its HDMI or MHL interface, making Canonical, another company joining “your smartphone is your laptop” trend. Ubuntu for Android will provide a full desktop experience and include office software (which apparently is Google Docs…) , web browsers (Chromium and Firefox), an email clients (Thunderbird) and media applications on Android phones docked to a screen and keyboard. Canonical claims the transition between Android and Ubuntu is seamless thanks to tight integration with the Android service layer. Ubuntu and Android share the same kernel. When docked, the Ubuntu OS boots and runs concurrently with Android. This allows both mobile and desktop functionality to […]
Yocto Project Quick Start Guide for Ubuntu
Yocto is an embedded Linux build system used to create a Linux distribution for a specific application/board combination. I’ll describe 2 methods to get started: Building and running a qemu image for x86 from scratch Using pre-built binaries to run the x86 image in qemu This is a shorter version of the longish Yocto Project’s Quick Start Guide. The official guide is more complete (explains all details) and give instructions for several distributions, whereas this guide simply lists each step and is focused on Ubuntu. So you could use this guide to start the build, and during the build (which will last a while), read the official guide to actually understand how it all works. Prerequisites First, you need to use bash instead of dash in Ubuntu:
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sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash |
and select “No” to use bash. Then install the required packages with apt-get:
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sudo apt-get install sed wget cvs subversion git-core coreutils \ unzip texi2html texinfo libsdl1.2-dev docbook-utils gawk \ python-pysqlite2 diffstat help2man make gcc build-essential \ g++ desktop-file-utils chrpath libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev \ mercurial autoconf automake groff libtool xterm |
Building and running a qemu image for […]
Trimble Yuma: A Military-Grade Rugged Ubuntu Tablet
SDG Systems announced an Ubuntu version of the Trimble Yuma, a rugged tablet for the industrial and military applications. The company also sells the product with Windows 7. This tablet enables the use of open source geospatial applications such as GRASS or Quantum GIS, as well as other Linux-based applications. The water- and dust-proof tablet meets the military MIL-STD-810F standard and run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS netbook edition, although the company said other Linux distributions are available on request with a minimum purchase agreement or engineering fee.. Here are the Yuma Trimble specifications: Processor: Intel Atom Z530 1.6 GHz processor Memory: 1 GB DDR2 Storage: 32 GB Solid State Hard Drive Expansion: SDIO memory slot ExpressCard 34mm slot Display: 7″ widescreen 1024×600 WSVGA 650 nit Standard Batteries: Dual hot-swappable Lithium-Ion batteries, 2600 mAmp each Extended Batteries: Dual hot-swappable Lithium-Ion batteries, 5100 mAmp each I/O: USB 2.0 port (x2), 9-pin serial port […]
HUD (Head-Up Display) Comes to Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu has announced Head-Up Display (HUD) for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) a contextual search interface that could, as Canonical expects, ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. So when Ubuntu 12.04 is released in April 2012, it will be the first LTS (Long Term Support) Ubuntu version with the Unity interface and the new HUD feature. I like HUD, as I find it similar to what is done in Windows 7 and what could be done with Google Desktop in Windows XP previously, although Ubuntu HUD goes further as it includes menus in the search. What I would NOT like however, is that they completely remove menus. I’d like to see it as a complement of menus (Which will be the case in 12.04), but this does not seem to be Canonical’s intention for future versions of Ubuntu (12.10 and beyond), as they want to replace menus with HUD. HUD will […]
The Past, Present and Future of Ubuntu for ARM
David Mandala of Canonical talked at Linux.Conf.Au on 18th of January 2012 about Ubuntu for ARM and the move from netbook to server support. You can read my notes below, or jump at the end of this post to watch the presentation. The Past 2008: Ubuntu decides to only support ARMv7 architecture vs. Debian that supports ARMv4 and above. 2009: Ubuntu release for Freescale i.MX51 (ARMv5 built), and then Marvell ARMAVA with ARMv6 and VFP (ARM floating point unit) support. 2010: April (10.04) The first ARMv7 release for OMAP3 (Beagleboard) with VFP, Thunb2, NEON and SMP for ARM and first netbook edition October (10.10) Pandabord (OMAP4) release with initial device tree support for ARM. Starts work with Linaro. 2011: 11.04 (5th release) – Supports OMAP3 and OMAP4 only. The netbook edition is using Qt, further improvement to device tree, further work with linaro and on the way to the Unified […]
Ubuntu TV Works on OMAP4 Pandaboard
Ricardo Salveti, Software Engineer at Canonical, has written a blog post saying that Ubuntu TV now support full video hardware acceleration on the Pandaboard, TI OMAP 4 low cost development board. A demo of Ubuntu TV on the ARM platform with Ubuntu TV UI and 720p/1080p video playback can be seen in the video below. Pandaboard is the first ARM platform that can fully run Ubuntu TV. If you have a Pandaboard, you can try it out by installing the packages available at Linaro’s Overlay PPA. Qt and Qtmobility are not there yet (Patches are available at https://github.com/robclark/qtmobility-1.1.0), but he said they would be soon. The source code for Ubuntu TV is available at https://code.launchpad.net/~s-team/ubuntutv/trunk 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. […]
Develop Android Apps, Deploy on Meego, Tizen, WebOS, Ubuntu and More
OpenMobile World Wide Inc. is demonstrating its Application Compatibility Layer (ACL) technology, capable of running Android apps on non-Android devices at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. The company claims that their solution brings more than 300,000 Android apps to device running on other platforms. The technology allows OEMs of Tablets, Set Top Boxes, smart TVs, Netbooks, In-Vehicle Infotainment devices and more to provide users access to a all Android applications. OpenWorld ACL technology currently works on tablets, STBs and netbooks based on MeeGo, WebOS and Ubuntu. The company also plans to make the technology available for Tizen, Windows, Bada, QNX, Symbian and more. The company claims 100% compatibility for Android apps including those developed using the Android Native Development Kit (NDK). The ACL layer is said not to drain the device resources at all. Device power and memory will be unchanged. Here are the Key Benefits of ACL according to […]