CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

March 5, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Future Versions of Ubuntu To Feature Mir Display Server Compatible With Android Graphics Drivers

The X server is getting old, and many developers complain it’s not an optimal solution anymore due to its (over) complexity, which was why Wayland was developed. However, it turns out Ubuntu will not use Wayland, but instead their own display server called Mir which will be used in all form factors from phones to desktops. Phoronix has provided a quick summary about the key aspects of Mir: Mir is a new display server being developed at Canonical and it is not based on X.Org or Wayland. Android graphics drivers will be supported. Existing DRM/KMS/Mesa/GBM (the open-source Linux graphics drivers) will work. Canonical is pressuring the binary blob vendors to make their drivers compatible. There will be support for legacy X11 applications through an integrated root-less X.Org Server. Canonical will natively support GTK3 and Qt/QML toolkits with Mir. Mir will be used for all form factors from Ubuntu Phones to […]

March 4, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

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 […]

March 4, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Dell Project Ophelia Rockchip RK3066 mini PC / Thin Client and PocketCloud Suite

As announced at CES 2013, Dell will be the first multinational company to enter the Android mini PC with Project Ophelia, a mini PC powered by Rockchip RK3066 with 1 GB RAM and 8 GB Flash, which would just be an American copy of Chinese products without support for MHL, and PocketCloud, a software suite to access your computers’ desktop remotely, create your own private cloud, and manage your devices remotely. The specifications have not been disclosed, but I could gather some specs mainly from CNET: SoC- Rockchip RK3066 Dual Core Cortex A9 @ 1.6Ghz System Memory – 1GB RAM Storage – 8GB Flash + micro SD Connectivity: Bluetooth Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (with push to connect button) Video Output – HDMI / MHL USB – microUSB Dimensions – 8.89cm x 3.81cm You can either power the device via MHL if you have a compatible television, or via USB like most […]

March 4, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

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 […]

March 3, 2013March 3, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

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. […]

March 1, 2013May 25, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 35 Comments

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 […]

March 1, 2013March 1, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Zopfli Library Improves Zlib Compression by 3 to 8%

Google developers have released a new compression library called Zopfli. This library, written in C, is compatible with zlib, yet provide a better compression, more exactly 3 to 8% according to Google. This library can be used on servers for better compression in order to save bandwidth, as well as delivering web pages faster. Since it’s fully compatible with zlib, the web browsers do not need to be changed. The only drawback is that it’s several magnitude slower than zlib, so it’s better used for static content that is compressed once, and sent over the Internet many times, and it may not be a good choice for dynamic content. The source code is available at https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/, so let’s try it. Get the code and build zopfli:

git clone https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/
cd zopfli
make

git clone https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/

cd zopfli

make

Different levels of compression are available:

./zopfli -h
Usage: zopfli [OPTION]... FILE
  -h    gives this help
  -c    write the result on standard output, instead of disk filename + '.gz'
  -v    verbose mode
  --gzip  output to gzip format (default)
  --deflate  output to deflate format instead of gzip
  --zlib  output to zlib format instead of gzip
  --i5  less compression, but faster
  --i10  less compression, but faster
  --i15  default compression, 15 iterations
  --i25  more compression, but slower
  --i50  more compression, but slower
  --i100  more compression, but slower
  --i250  more compression, but slower
  --i500  more compression, but slower
  --i1000  more compression, but slower

./zopfli -h

Usage: zopfli [OPTION]... FILE

-h gives this help

-c write the result on standard output, instead of disk filename + '.gz'

-v verbose mode

--gzip output to gzip format (default)

--deflate output to deflate format instead of gzip

--zlib output to zlib format instead of gzip

--i5 less compression, but faster

--i10 less compression, but faster

--i15 default compression, 15 iterations

--i25 more compression, but slower

--i50 more compression, but slower

--i100 more compression, but slower

--i250 more compression, but slower

--i500 more compression, but slower

--i1000 more compression, but slower

For testing purpose, I’ve just saved this blog as one html file (test.html – 67275 bytes) […]

March 1, 2013March 1, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

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 […]