Ubuntu 16.10 Images Released for Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail Processors

Canonical formally released Ubuntu 16.10 “Yakkety Yak” yesterday with  a developer preview of Unity 8 including desktop, tablet and phone UX convergence, Hybrid cloud operations with Juju 2.0, Snapd 2.16 with more than 500 snaps, etc..  Ian Morrison (Linuxium) wasted no time, and put together a Ubuntu 16.10 image working on platforms powered by Intel Bay Trail and Cherry Trail processor with modifications to have audio, WiFi and Bluetooth working. If you want to try Ubuntu 16.04 on your device you can download ubuntu-16.10-desktop-linuxium.iso and prepare a bootable USB flash the usual way with rufus, or other utilities. If you’d like to try an alternative  Ubuntu flavor such as Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, or Ubuntu MATE, Linuxium got you served too, and you’ll find the images on his blog. Unity 7 is still running by default in Ubuntu 16.04, but if you are curious about Unity 8 convergence desktop/tablet/phone user […]

WeTek Play 2 Amlogic S905 TV Box Gets Ubuntu 16.04 Mate and Minimal Firmware Images

WeTek Play 2 is the latest TV box from WeTek with DVB or ATSC tuner, and powered by Amlogic S905-H processor. It ships with Android 5.1.1, but Ubuntu 16.04 Mate and Ubuntu 16.04 minimal firmware images have been released by the community. You can try Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Mate (with desktop environment) or the headless Ubuntu 16.04 LTS minimal image by uncompressing the images, and flashing them to a micro SD card with dd or Win32DiskImager.  Two default credentials (username/password) are provided:  wetek/wetek and root/wetek. This required the latest Play 2 Android firmware, so make sure you get the latest OTA update before trying Ubuntu. The Ubuntu 16.04 images should just boot from the SD card without replacing or affecting your Android installation. If this type of images for Amlogic S905 seems similar, it’s because are based on Hardkernel ODROID-C2 Ubuntu 16.04 images. You can find the Linux kernel for […]

MinnowBoard Turbot SBC Gets a Quad Core Atom E3845 Processor, Better Ethernet, and a Fansink

MinnowBoard Turbot open source hardware SBC was released in 2015 with an Intel Atom E3826 dual core Bay Trail-I processor, 2GB RAM, SATA and Gigabit Ethernet support, and a new version – MinnowBoard Turbot Quad – with a more powerful quad core processor, an heatsink and fan, and better Ethernet connectivity will be launched in December. MinnowBoard Turbot Quad “MBT-4210” board specifications: SoC – Intel Atom E3845 quad core Bay Trail-I processor @ 1.92 GHz with Intel HD graphics @ 542 / 792 MHz (10W TDP) System Memory – 2GB DDR3L 1067 MT/s (Soldered) Storage – 1x SATA2 3Gbs, 1x micro SD card slot, , 8 MB SPI Flash for firmware (Tianocore UEFI, Coreboot, SeaBIOS) Video & Audio Output – 1x micro HDMI connector Connectivity – 10/100/1000M Ethernet RJ-45 connector (Intel i211 instead of Realtek NIC on first board) USB – 1x USB 3.0 host, 1x USB 2.0 host Debugging […]

Android 7.0 Released, LG V20 Android Nougat Smartphone Coming Soon

Since Google has changed their way of releasing new version of Android, as they are now taking input from developers using preview releases, we’ve known the main changes in Android 7.0 for a while including multi-window support, improved security, virtual reality support, Vulkan API, a new JIT/AOT compiler, and so on. The company has now made it official, and released Android 7.0 earlier today. Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C, and Android One smartphones will receive an OTA update with the new firmware, and some other phones enrolled in Android Beta program will also get Android 7.0, but older Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 devices won’t. Google and LG also unveiled the upcoming LG V20, the first smartphone to ship with Android 7.0. Few details have been provided so far The LG V20 builds upon the premium and rich multimedia smartphone experience of last […]

How to Customize Amlogic Android Firmware – A Tutorial with NEXBOX A95X (S905) TV Box

CNXSoft: Bear in mind that there are multiple versions of Nexbox A95X. Yesterday, I published the review of Nexbox A95X with Android 6.0, with the model based on Amlogic S905X processor. In this article, Karl had a look at Nexbox A95X with Amlogic S905 processor, which he purchased a couple of months ago, but since he was not happy with the Android 5.1 firmware, he decided to customize it. Karl here with a review of the Nexbox A95X S905 box. This took a while to even start. I received the box about 2 months ago and I dived right in and broke it. I didn’t have factory firmware, and wasn’t cautious enough and bricked it. I found some firmware that worked but it didn’t work very well for me. Email’s to Nexbox directly didn’t help and I was stuck with a bricked box… I later found someone who had factory […]

Minimal Ubuntu 16.04 Image for ODROID-C2, and C1/C1+ Boards, Ubuntu Core Image for Bubblegum-96 Board

If you’ve been wanting minimal Ubuntu distributions for your server, IoT, or other headless projects, there are some good news from Hardkernel with the release of a minimal Ubuntu 16.04 image for ODROID-C2 and ODROID-C1+ boards, and Canonical has recently announced Actions Semi S900 based BubbleGum-96 board was getting support for Ubuntu Core distribution. If you’re using an ODROID board you can download ubuntu64-16.04-minimal-odroid-c2-20160803.img.xz (196MB) firmware, which become 1.7 GB once uncompressed and flash it 2GB or greater micro SD card. After Raspberry Pi 2 and Samsung Artik 5/10, Bubblegum-96 is the third officially supported board that can run Ubuntu Core. You can download the 3.63GB beta image and instructions to flash it from an Ubuntu 16.04 machine on Mega. Bugglegum-96 is a 96boards compliant development board based on an quad core Cortex A53 processor with 2GB RAM and 8GB flash manufactured and sold by ucRobotics for $89. Jean-Luc Aufranc […]

Ubuntu 16.04.1 ISO Images Released for Intel Atom Bay Trail & Cherry Trail Compute Sticks

Canonical has recently released Ubuntu 16.04.1, which is now considered stable enough to update from Ubuntu 14.04.04 LTS, and while I could do that easily on my main machine using update-manager, upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 on Intel Atom “Bay Trail” and “Cherry Trail” devices is a bit more complicated if you need audio & wireless networking (WiFi/Bluetooth) support since the kernel needs to be patched, and on top of that recent Linux kernels are not stable on such platforms without some extra hacks. Linuxium has done all the hard work, and created Ubuntu 16.04.1 ISO images for Intel Atom Compute Sticks with working audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, and “C-state” patchsets to avoid freezes. The images may also work on other devices, but this has not been tested so far. If you want to give it a try, you can download ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-linuxium-ics.iso, and flash it to a USB drive with Rufus (Windows) […]

Embedded Linux Conference & IoT Summit Europe 2016 Schedule

Embedded Linux Conference & IoT summit 2016 first took place in the US in April, but the events are now also scheduled in Europe on October 11 – 13 in Berlin, Germany, and the schedule has now been published. Even if you are no going to attend, it’s always interesting to find out more about the topic covered in that type of events, so I had a look, and created my own virtual schedule with some of the sessions. Tuesday, October 11 10:40 – 11:30 – JerryScript: An Ultra-lightweight JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things – Tilmann Scheller, Samsung Electronics JerryScript is a lightweight JavaScript engine designed to bring the success of JavaScript to small IoT devices like lamps, thermometers, switches and sensors. This class of devices tends to use resource-constrained microcontrollers which are too small to fit a large JavaScript engine like V8 or JavaScriptCore. JerryScript is heavily […]

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