Linux on ARM

Binary Emotions informs Softpedia today about the general availability of Raspberry WebKiosk 6.0, a major update to the Open Source project that tries to develop the cheapest possible web kiosk operating systems for Raspberry Pi SBCs.

Chromium OS for SBC aimed to bring Chromium operating systems to low cost development boards such as the Raspberry Pi 3 board, but the website is now down, and the developer announced he had stopped working on it several months ago due the hardware limitations of the Raspberry Pi 3 board.

Hardkernel ODROID-C2 board is getting some direct competition with FriendELEC’s NanoPi K2 development board powered with Amlogic S905 processor with 2GB RAM, a very similar form factor, and many of the same features, which together with Khadas Vim (Pro) brings the number of low cost Amlogic based development boards to three.

The OpenBSD 6.1 operating system was officially announced today, April 11, 2017, by developer Theo de Raadt. It's a major release that adds support for new platforms, new hardware, and lots of up-to-date components.

When you want to play media in your living room, there are countless options nowadays. You can buy an Apple TV, Xbox One, Roku, or something else. Of course, for some people, a self-built home theater computer is a more rewarding experience. Thanks to Linux and solutions like Kodi, it can be easy to build a very capable media center machine.

The development team behind the OpenELEC Linux-based entertainment operating system designed for embedded devices were proud to announce earlier the release and general availability of OpenELEC 8.0.

Yesterday as I wrote about the Embedded Systems Conference 2017 schedule I came across a potentially interesting talk entitled “Building A Brain With Raspberry Pi and Zulu Embedded JVM” by Azul Systems that will explain how to build a brain emulator using a cluster of Raspberry Pi boards. I wanted to find more about it, but I have not been able to find any details about the project/demo at this stage.

Shenzhen Xunlong has already been selling 64-bit ARM development board with their Orange Pi PC 2 & Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 H5 boards based on Allwinner H5, as well as Orange Pi Win board powered by Allwinner A64 processor.

GPU compute promises to deliver much better performance compared to CPU compute for application such a computer vision and machine learning, but the problem is that many developers may not have the right skills or time to leverage APIs such as OpenCL. So ARM decided to write their own ARM Compute library and has now released it under an MIT license.

I’ve received NanoPi NEO 2 boards, add-boards and sensor modules last week, where we could see how small the boards were, and how it could be suitable for IoT projects or “hardware hacking” education.  Before testing the board with the add-ons, I have to select the image to run on the board, and currently we have two choices: Ubuntu 16.04.2 FriendELEC image with Linux 3.10 “legacy” kernel, or Armbian Ubuntu 16.04.2 Xenial nightly build with Linux 4.10 “mainline” kernel.

Orange Pi 2G-IoT was unveiled at the start of the year as an ultra cheap ($10) Linux development board with 2G cellular connectivity. The board has just launched for $9.90 + shipping on Aliexpress.

Everyday we can read stories about password database hacking, malware, ransomware, and so on, and companies can try to protect themselves by paying professionals that do a more or less good jobs, but individuals can’t afford professional service, so it is harder to protect oneself.

The first and only planned point release to Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available as a minor update to this cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software. Coming three weeks after the big Phoronix Test Suite 7.0 release, Phoronix Test Suite 7.0.1 contains a few fixes and other minor enhancements to our long-standing open-source benchmarking framework.

Friends and fellows, we’re super glad to announce the outcome of a beautiful partnership with ARM University Program and Mouser: the Embedded Linux Education Kit. This is the ninth and latest Education Kit from ARM University and it’s beautiful to be part of such a great initiative.

LibreELEC developers announced the release and general availability of the first maintenance update to the major LibreELEC 8.0 stable series of the Linux-based operating system built around the Kodi open-source media center.