Updates - Nov 17

1 News

1.1 Links

• Real Catapult for Angry birds using Bluetooth - http://armdevices.net/2012/11/02/angry-birds-bluetooth-catapult-with-arm-cortex-m3-and-sensors/
• Gentoo forks UDEV http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2262. The actual fork is available at https://github.com/gentoo/udev-ng. Also see Linus's point on UDEV. IMHO, the tying up of UDEV and systemd is a problem for Ubuntu and other distros that don't want to use systemd but something else like upstart or even SysV init.
• LDT (Linux Driver Template) posted to LKML. This is really worth looking at for any new drivers that we need to develop - https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/11/13/531
• Here's something that Assembler programmers will enjoy reading. Raymond Chen shows how he hard patched MS Money -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/11/13/10367904.aspx

1.2 Releases

• Pendrive linux users will love this - SLAX 7 RC1 is out - http://www.tomas-m.com/blog/19139-Slax-7-release-candidate-1.html.
• Its five years since Android was announced. The original announcement was made in 2007 - http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/press_110507.html. After Cupcake, Eclair, Froyo hit the mainstream in Aug 2010. That was followed by Gingerbread in Dec 2010 and Honeycomb, ICS and JB following those. A couple of days ago, Google announced the availability of JB SDK - http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/11/introducing-android-42-new-and-improved.html

1.3 Industry

• Aptina announces new Sensors for the Auto market - http://www.aptina.com/news/press/new_image_co-processor_platform_powers_aptina_hdr_automotive_image_sensors?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PressReleases-AptinaImaging+%28Press+Releases+-+Aptina%29
• Exynos5 based dev board - Dual-A15 $249 - http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
• Likewise, a Snapdragon 8060 based dev board - Dual-Krait $498 - http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard.aspx
• Microsoft has shared their roadmap for Embedded - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Features/2012/Nov12/11-13EmbeddedRoadmap.aspx
• With ARM announcing that their 64bit devices (Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53) http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a50/index.php, Linaro has also announced the creation of an ARM exterprise/servers group - LEG http://www.linaro.org/news/release/industry-leaders-collaborate-to-accelerate-software-ecosystem-for-arm-servers-and-join-linaro/en.
• AIA announces USB3 Vision standard that is developed specifically for Vision and Cameras. The standard should have BW of 350 Mbps. I don't have the details fully though - http://www.visiononline.org/vision-standards-details.cfm?type=11 and http://www.packagingdigest.com/article/522674-USB3_Vision_Standard.php are some sources of information that I came across.
• Paper from Dundee University on using Kinect to control optical tweezers - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.0220v1.pdf

Ubuntu Core - Alpha2 with both armel and armhf

I didn't expect it, but armhf seems to be part of ubuntu-core for precise. That's pretty surprising because I remembering seeing a number of packages that didn't build for armhf about a month back.

Nevertheless, its good if armhf and armel is part of ubuntu-core. The only question is whether we will get all the community supported packages on both or only Cannonical ones? I'm specifically interested in not running Unity and much rather have LXDE running. The only question is whether there will be LXDE armhf packages in addition to armel ones.

Get a working ubuntu armel system from ubuntu core

This uses qemu-arm to set things up in 10 simple steps

1. Download the latest rootfs from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/daily/current/
2. sudo untar it into a directory say arm-rootfs
3. cd arm-rootfs
4. cp /usr/bin/qemu-static-arm usr/bin. This will run for every command
5. cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/. This is so that we can get network access
6.  for m in `echo 'sys dev proc'`; do sudo mount /$m ./$m -o bind; done
5. Now sudo chroot . /bin/bash
6. apt-get update
7. Now run all the commands you need to finish downloading and installing software.
8 In the end unmount all the bound points  - for m in `echo 'sys dev proc'`; do sudo umount ./$m; done
9. Create the a tar ball
10. Publish!

Tips from  http://omappedia.org/wiki/OMAP_Ubuntu_Core