Year ago we had Linaro Connect right after FOSDEM so I decided to skip and walk to Golden Gate instead. But this year there were no conflicts!

Months before we had discussion on SzLUUG mailing list about who goes for FOSDEM. There were about 9 people wanting and we ended with five. So on Friday morning friends arrived near my house, I jumped into car, we grabbed 4th one (Tomek was in London at that time) and went to Berlin Schönefeld airport for 07:00 Easyjet flight.

And we missed it… 5-10 minutes late we were ;( 75€ per person and 10 hours later he took off from SXF airport.

But that 10h was not wasted. Berlin has very nice Technical Museum with many trains, cars, planes and other exhibitions. And they had Trabant 601 as well:

Then trip to shops (Saturn, Media Markt) in search for HTC Desire X case (Magda) and LG Nexus 4 (me). Avoid Saturn — they do not handle credit card payments at Alexanderplatz so I had to walk to the ATM. Two S-Bahns later we passed security check and went to the gate early enough to fly.

BRU airport… I think that (with exception of SXF/TXL) it is my most visited airport as it was my 5th FOSDEM and there was UDS-M around as well. But this time we took a bus instead of a train. 14€ ticket works for 72 hours so cover all trips perfectly. Few hours later we were joking that this multi country journey was exhausting as we were in Berlin, Brussels, went though Geneve (bus stop) to Luxembourg (square) and passed near London (restaurant) ;D

Hotel, drop stuff, connect chargers, went for beer event. Crowdy as usual it was. But I managed to meet some friends (but also missed lot of them) and grabbed few beers. Good spent time. Too bad that I was so tired that went back to hotel just right after midnight.

Saturday

Breakfast in St. Nicolas hotel maybe is not the best but provides enough energy to survive a day. Met several guys there, Philip gave me Kindle Paperwhite which I bought few days before (with delivery to his house to lower price) and his famous Belgium/Holland/Luxembourg guidebook. I also got Beagle pendrive from Koen.

Then overcrowded bus 71 and FOSDEM! I told Bartek where things are (but at that time I had no idea of K building) and we split. In AW building I met friends manning OpenEmbedded stand just right in front of building entry.

Circuitco had Beaglebone stand right to it:

That robot was great example what you can do with enough signals available to drive all those motors. And what you can do with 3D printers ;D

I do not know is it due to crisis or something but AW building had just half of a space for stands used…

Then I went for talks:

• “Embedded distro shootout: buildroot vs. Debian” — wasted time. Long discussion about Emdebian + short info that Buildroot works in other way. Could be nice talk if done in other way.
• “Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems” — talk done by Jon Masters and his clone. As usual first “what the hell is 64-bit ARM” and then how Fedora bootstraps itself. Nice talk, got some new stuff. Have to dig for Cavium SDK.
• “Porting OpenJDK to AArch64″ — interesting it was. Two speakers, lot of technical details.
• “ARMv8, ARM’s new architecture including 64-bit” by Andrew Wafaa. Mostly to catch speaker in easy way ;D
• “Bootstrapping Debian-based distributions for new architectures” – I was lazy to go somewhere else but it was good talk.
• “Bootstrapping the Debian/Ubuntu arm64 ports” by Wookey. Kind of recycled talk from Barcelona but I like his presentations. Also first one without “what the hell is armv8″ introduction.

I also had nice discussion with Jolla guys about their system/device and would I like to test it once they will have something ready for complains. Played a bit with Firefox OS on their reference developer platform and on Nexus S and was not impressed — for example it looked like they have to learn about DPI…

Then I met OE crew and few other guys and when finally noticed that it is time to go to the hotel and drop gear there. Once arrived it was a bit to late to go somewhere and search for some event so I joined SzLUUG team and we went for a meal, chocolates and then some drinking with Kerneliusz (SzLUUG mascotte):

Sunday

Breakfast, packing gear and go for a bus which was less crowded than day before (but we are a bit late as well). As we had to leave after 14:00 I managed only two talks:

• “systemd, Two Years Later” — some Ubuntu trolling and project status. Nice talk.
• “Porting applications to 64-Bit ARM Architecture” by Riku Voipio (main AArch64 porter at Linaro). Good discussion in a room, some nice hints and suggestions. Read his recent blog post about ARMv8 porting

Then walk, tram, bus and security check. This time I did not have to take developer boards from backpack as I gave them away during event. We arrived in Berlin and (due to Micha?’s fosdem flu) I drove us back home.

Summary

It was great event as usual. But distance between K building and rest was too big for sessions which are one after another. I dropped some entries from my calendar just because it would be H->K->H->K switching.

Android application for schedule was ok. Would be nice to make a bigger effort and update it to cover K building as well and add a way to see what is going on in each building/room to reduce time before sessions.

Funny part

On Saturday I realized that for some reason I may remind Jon Masters… That’s due to hardware I had with me:

• two developer boards
• two phones
• two tablets
• 3 USB chargers
• 4 microUSB cables

The good thing is that they were not of same type (except some cables) :D

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FOSDEM 2013 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

This year no one blocked me from going to FOSDEM ;D

What are plans? There will be some AArch64 related talks which I want to attend:

• Bootstrapping Fedora for AArch64
• Bootstrapping Debian/Ubuntu for AArch64
• Porting software for AArch64
• Porting OpenJDK for AArch64
• What the hell is AArch64

Few ARM ones:

• Freedreno update
• Open ARM GPU drivers
• ARM status in Linux kernel

Few for entertainment:

• Buildroot contra Debian
• Baserock introduction
• Eudev

Some for curiosity:

• HipHop
• Why there is no such thing as FOSS phone?

Original titles may differ. There are over 450 events during FOSDEM, several keynotes etc. There will be also few thousand people so I would rather not find a time to attend even half of sessions listed above… But for me this is how this conference work :D

Normally I do not take hardware with my (other than phone). This time I packed two boards, two tablets and hope to get rid of most of them ;)

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Going for FOSDEM was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some time passed since last Chromebook post so I want to give small update on Ubuntu status.

Dylan Reid from Chromium team fixed ALSA driver so frying speakers is now past. This change will go into next stable Chromium update probably. I got it merged into Ubuntu kernel and released as “3.4.0-4″ version in PPA.

In meantime Vladimir Smirnov took a look at “release-R25″ branch of kernel and got it booted. He shared configuration so I went with it, synced with Ubuntu one and got it running on my Chromebook. So expect new kernel release after FOSDEM.

There are Mali OpenGLES drivers available for download. I was unable to use them with R23 kernel (current Ubuntu one) but they do work with R25 branch so another thing to take care. This time I have to make new packaging as I need to add click thought license support. After that we can drop Chromium OS from our devices ;)

VBoot utilities are also in PPA. So signing of kernels and manipulating partition tables do not need files from Chromium anymore.

But there is one thing. Or rather lack of it… I do not have time to check do my packages work under older versions of Ubuntu (12.04, 12.10). Due to that I will not release any new updates for them — will support only ‘raring’ (13.04). Everything will be available in PPA so anyone can test.

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Chromebook update was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

My work often requires booting AArch64 fast models. As there are two of them and each has different arguments I decided to write simple script to handle that.

Script takes three arguments:

• kernel
• rootfs (can be skipped)
• model type (foundation/rtsm — first one as default)

This is work in progress — for example there is no network configured for RTSM yet. But I hope that it will be useful for other users.

#!/bin/bash

model=foundation
kernel=
rootfs=

if [ ! -z $3 ]; then
        model=full
fi

if [ -z $1 ]; then
        echo "Usage: boot-armv8 KERNEL ROOTFS"
else
        kernel=`realpath $1`
fi

if [ ! -z $2 ]; then
        rootfs=`realpath $2`
fi

case $model in
        foundation)
                if [ ! -z $rootfs ];then
                        rootfs=" --block-device $rootfs"
                fi
                sudo ip tuntap add tap0 mode tap
                sudo ifconfig tap0 192.168.168.1
                ~/devel/canonical/aarch64/FastModels/Foundation_v8pkg/Foundation_v8 \
                        --image $kernel \
                        --network bridged --network-bridge=tap0 \
                        $rootfs
                ;;
        rtsm)
                if [ ! -z $rootfs ];then
                        rootfs=" -C motherboard.mmc.p_mmc_file=$rootfs "
                fi
                export ARMLMD_LICENSE_FILE=8224@flexlm.linaro.org
                ~/devel/canonical/aarch64/FastModels/VE/AEMv8_0.8.4407/ModelDebugger_7.1/bin/model_shell64 \
                        -a $kernel \
                        $rootfs \
                        ~/devel/canonical/aarch64/FastModels/VE/AEMv8_0.8.4407/lib/Linux64/RTSM_VE_AEMv8A.so
                ;;
esac

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Boot AArch64 in easy way was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Most of my work at Linaro is around AArch64 architecture. Ubuntu cross compilers were kind of adopted by Matthias Klose (Debian/Ubuntu toolchain maintainer) so I was able to spend more time on ARMv8.

We have two projects at Launchpad:

• Linaro AArch64 cross-distro work
• Linaro OpenEmbedded

In short: first one is about porting software to ARMv8, second about OpenEmbedded support for it. The fact that both projects are on Launchpad does not mean that they are for Ubuntu (which is common mistake). It is open for everyone. We have people working on fixing packages in Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu (when it comes to distributions) and in OpenEmbedded. All of that with usual mantra: upstream first.

So how it goes today? I would say that quite good. Since September (when we started OpenEmbedded work) we got to point when we fixed several projects and find less and less new ones to work on.

For me it is nice experience. As I am not a programmer (my last application was for AmigaOS in last millennium) I was often surprised how small changes are sometimes needed to get software running. I got X11 running with ~8 lines of code. Libav required editing of one line in configure script. NumPy was adding 4 lines. OProfile required copying few lines from kernel source. And all those got merged upstream or is on a way to it.

If you want to track our work then check “Merge ARMv8 support into OpenEmbedded” blueprint where I track every project I touch. And ignore ‘milestone’ field — it is always work in progress because every project we fix gives us new projects to build. Which often means another set of software to patch.

I prefer not to think how much it would take us without OpenEmbedded. Being able to just easily cross compile huge amount of software in automated way is great. Sure, from time to time I had to boot software model and do some native compilation or run some tests. But mostly to generate some files which are not properly built/guessed during cross compilation.

Also I would like to thank all maintainers (from OE and upstream projects) for reviewing all our patches and all help we got. But we did not finished yet — there is a long queue of things to clean up and send for merging :)

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AArch64 porting update was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Recently I got offer from one of head hunters company. They represent one of companies I trusted but no longer care about.

I have been retained by XZYA (specifically XZRI – XZYA Research Institute which is their European R&D and innovation division) to connect with candidates that they would like to speak to relative to the creation for 2 new Open Source labs which XZYA are creating as part of their global drive to increased Open Source Software adoption and evangelism within their business.

The new Open Source team will be made up of software engineers and specialists working across various open source SW areas, projects and groups – for example Linux kernel, Linaro, LLVM, web servers (webkit, node.js, jquery, chromium lighttpd), Wayland, XEN etc

It’s really important to note that the positions being created will allow the individuals selected to continue to be open source community / project focused (70-80% of your time committing, maintaining or contributing to projects) but representing XZYA.

The Open Source labs will be located both in Espoo, Finland and in Staines, UK (near London). Positions can be in either location.

Having consulted my network as well as undertaken some market due diligence and research, I wanted to connect with you to ascertain whether I could secure your interest in being one of the founding members of this new team.

It does sound interesting but I do not want to work for company which do not care about product design or cooperation with external developers.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got interesting job offer and refused was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Few months ago prices of RAM for my desktop went down so I upgraded to 24 gigabytes. By most of time I use maybe half of it but this allows to do some work faster…

Most of my AArch64 work relates with using OpenEmbedded to build something. To get it faster I moved TMPDIR to separate hard drive but finally decided that when I am not building “world” (to find new breakage) I do not need more than 8-12 GB of space.

So now my TMPDIR is symlink to /tmp/OE/tmp/ directory and sstate cache files are on hard disk. This allows me to do quick builds of random software or system images (“linaro-image-lamp” from scratch is 5 minutes). When OE complains about lack of disk space I just remove contents of “tmp-eglibc” directory and retry build. Everything needed for build goes from sstate cache.

But there are days like today — OE-Core maintainers merged my “gmp” patch for AArch64 so I dropped it from “meta-aarch64″ layer and have to wait a bit for rebuilding of all source packages. After that I will have my fast builds again.

So if you do a lot of builds then invest in memory — most of today desktop can take 32 GB…

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Doing OpenEmbedded builds in RAM was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

We are using OpenEmbedded to build software for AArch64 (64-bit ARMv8 architecture). There are some components which do not build and we fix them when time allows.

So today I looked at stats of my nightly build of “bitbake world -k” and notices 46-49 build failures. Went thought list, removed those which are already reported for porting, tried to build failed ones to find out how much work we need to get it fixed. And one of them was “xserver-xorg”…

I took a chance and got it built by patching few source files. Few minutes later I got it booted in commercial ARMv8 fast model (foundations one lacks graphics emulation):

As you see Xterm window in unreadable. So I changed byte order, rebuilt and booted image with new Xserver:

I do not plan to test X11 environments in fast model — it takes too much CPU time. But it is nice to see native 64-bit X11 running ;)

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Started X11 on AArch64 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

During last few days I played with CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly builds on my Nexus S phone. Then went back to CM 10 as it is more stable. But this also reminded me that I have 2 years old device…

So I did another round of checking what are options. As it will be for next 2 years I want 2GB of RAM, 720p screen and LTE support. And there is very small amount of those :(

1. HTC Butterfly. MicrosD slot, 1080p screen, Japan only so far.

2. LG Nexus 4. Latest Android for few releases granted. But also lack of microSD slot and only 16GB of storage.

3. LG Optimus G. Base of Nexus 4. Not available outside of few operators (mostly US).

4. Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (GT-9305). MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

5. Samsung Galaxy Note II. MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

Now it is time to complain :)

LG Nexus 4 is available only in some stores (or phone operators) for 450+ € — no Google Play Store like it was with earlier models (I do not call current state as selling). Also no LTE on European frequencies. No 32GB storage model.

Samsung GT-9305 sounds interesting. But… It is Exynos 4412 based. And I read The Saga of a CyanogenMod Exynos4 device maintainer by Andrew Dodd which gives clear message “avoid Exynos4 if you can”. If even Samsung update can break your device then something is going wrong. And so far SGS3 LTE lacks CyanogenMod support which is one of main blockers for me as it shows that there are no custom “ROMs” for it (I do not count images remixed from stock images).

Galaxy Note II is huge and would take some time to get used to it. Has CM support already. But again — Exynos4 ;(

So it looks like I need to wait another few months and check will there be something worth buying. In meantime I will stay with last CM10 release running on my Nexus S.

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I want to update my mobile phone was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Few people already asked me how open Samsung Chromebook is. So let’s take a look.

Kernel is open. Git tree is available and so are instructions on how to build it. You can check post by Olof Johansonn or take a look at Chromium ebuild. Remember that images need to have DeviceTree attached.

There are few firmware blobs but most of them are available in “linux-firmware” package in Ubuntu. The only exception is “mrvl/sd8797_uapsta.bin” file which is present in Marvell’s firmware repo.

You also need to sign kernels. But tools and developer keys are available as well. We have preliminary version of package for it.

X11 drivers are available as well. Both video (armsoc) and input (cmt) are open. You can run X11 just fine without them even. I provide armsoc one but decided to skip “cmt” one cause “evdev” one works ok.

So where are those ugly binary blobs? In standard places…

One is OpenGL ES support. There is “libmali.0.0.35″ which works as libEGL and libGLESv2 but no source for it (kernel part is open). Also license is missing. You can copy it from Chromium (I made package for Ubuntu) but results vary. I would love to get it working cause it can make Chromium browser faster.

Other is video acceleration. Under Chromium there is set of OpenMAX libraries. Under Ubuntu I see only crashes.

Flash plugin is yet another story. Rune K. Svendsen got it partially working but it is still not like it could be.

There is also Google Hangouts plugin under Chromium. So far no information will it work under non-Chromium distribution.

If you have anything to add here then write a comment. And consider joining “Samsung Chromebook (ARM) hackers” team to help us in getting our distros working better and better.

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How open Chromebook is? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Some time passed since my earlier post. I had to think about few things and made some decisions.

I will write an installation instruction for Samsung Chromebook users — about installing other operating system on internal storage. Targeted at advanced users but with more or less exact steps. If you do not know how to enable “developer” mode in Chromium then sorry…

And in meantime I worked on packaging. Few minutes ago I pushed kernel to my PPA and once it get built I will offer it in Chromebook hackers PPA so users will be able to use it instead of Chromium OS one. It will need signing and putting on proper partition but, like I wrote above, my packages are not only for novice level users.

Thanks to work started by Antonio Terceiro we have preliminary version of vboot utilities package. I cleaned it a bit and got to state when “cgpt” and “vbutil_kernel” are provided so playing with partitioning will not need files from Chromium OS. Will upload it into PPA as well.

Left speaker in my Chromebook died totally so I decided to spend some time on getting UCM profiles available in “quantal” and “precise” releases of Ubuntu as well. SRU process in progress…

Also got 32GB microSD card so one step closer to having other distributions running. Thinking of Debian here of course. But it is in deep freeze now so harder to get new packages there.

How can you help? Test, file bugs, attach fixes to bugs. And can also replace speaker in my Chromebook so I will not have to use headphones ;D

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I did not finished with Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Lot of people asked me how I managed to fry left speaker in my Chromebook. There are also few which said that it is Ubuntu fault.

So today I used recovery to wipe out my installation of Ubuntu from device and decided to check under Chromium OS. And yes, I got nice smell of burnt plastic etc coming from left speaker area.

Why? Because it is kernel bug. Not Ubuntu, ALSA or user. Ok, it is a bit of user’s fault cause you should not have to play with ALSA mixer. But you can — all binaries are part of Chromium OS stable.

So let me give you needed steps:

1. Boot Samsung Chromebook (ARM one) to Chromium OS
2. Login or use guest session
3. Run terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t)
4. Run “alsamixer -c0″
5. Set “Lineout” to highest value
6. Unmute everything what starts with “Left” or “Right” (depends which speaker you do not like)
7. Touch speakers (but better not for long)
8. Hold “Power” button to shut down before it will burn though your desk.

In normal situation I would assume that sound driver will take care of combinations which may break your hardware. But looks like Chromebook developers did had such idea.

Is this howto useful? I think it is. Cause if you have device broken in some way and you want to get it replaced you can just run it and hope for replacement instead of repair.

And when next time someone will write me “go and fix ubuntu rather than putting blame on samsung. Its Ubuntu which is the cause” like I got in recent comment I will just ban such person from commenting.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
How to fry speakers in your Chromebook was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I bought many Samsung products. There were monitors, cellphones, storage and others. But I am starting to feel that it is time to change vendor…

All because Chromebook…

Device pushed to market in a big rush with kernel allowing users to burn devices. I really do not like smell of burnt speakers and plastics. Like Dylan Reid commented my Google+ post:

I’m guessing that a path was set up from MIC1 (wired to DMIC in) to the left speaker output. Playing the digital mic input as analog at full volume seems like something that might cause speaker failure, and wouldn’t necessarily be audible while it is happening.

My device runs Ubuntu 13.04, has UCM profiles installed to get sound working on what left from speakers but if application touch ALSA in wrong way then I have to open windows to get some air and get smoke out.

I never had such problems with all devices I played with. NEVER

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Dear Samsung: @#$@%@!!!!11!!$#$# you! was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I do a lot of cross compilations. With different software elements. But sometimes I want to kick their authors into ass…

There is a good sign when you see $(CC) in Makefiles as it shows that author of code learnt that “gcc” is not the only compiler. But this is not the only compiler you should know about.

Recently I was adding one component (will save a name) into OpenEmbedded as this is one of dependencies for some bigger project (which I do not want to blog about). Argh… I managed to cross built it but patches are UGLY (will get better).

Using $(CC) to build everything is just broken. Especially when you need to compile a tool which will generate some code to get everything built. There is $(BUILD_CC) for it but you have to use it wisely. If there are common parts then compile them with $(BUILD_CC) if you need to run it and with $(CC) if you not. This way we, cross compilation guys, can just do “./configure;make;make install;package” is it native or cross build. Autotools (die, die, die) are able to handle that — so is your code if you write Makefiles properly.

But do not reuse same object files for target and native binaries — let it be “common.o” and “native/common.o” for example. OK, if you do only native builds then it will take a bit more disk space but we have 2012 not 1995… Storage is cheap.

There is also $(HOST_CC) but that’s for other post…

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There are other compilers than $(CC) was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Somewhere in 2010/11 I decided to clean up mess of naming machines at home and decided to go with character names from “Winnie the Pooh” books (Polish edition). Today I got new developer board and had to spend a moment to get a name for it.

So “klapouchy” (Eyeore) will be new name for DragonBoard. Maybe not best one but most of the names are already taken:

• krzys (Christopher Robin) is my router (because Chris decides who can enter Hundred Acre Wood which is the name of my WiFi network)
• puchatek (Winnie the Pooh) is main desktop
• lumpek (Lumpy) is conference laptop (it was lucek before because it got Ubuntu Lucid as first system)
• gofer (Gopher) is Efika MX Smartbook
• krolik (Rabbit) is Samsung Chromebook
• malenstwo (Roo) is Pandaboard (there were malenstwo-a1 and malenstwo-ea1 when I had two boards)
• prosiaczek (Piglet) was MX53 Quickstart
• kangurzyca (Kanga) is my wife laptop (she chosen the name)
• sowa (Owl) is another router
• tygrysek (Tigger) is my VPS (at beginning it was up/down/up/down all the time)

So most of the names from books are already taken. There are also Disney movies which adds few new ones (like Gopher and Lumpy) and cartoons (which I am not fan of). In worst case one day I will start re-using names or add names from other story.

What I used before? Desktop was “home” or “hrw”, Dell laptop (now “kangurzyca”) was “maluch” (small) due to 12″ size, “lumpek” was “lucek” due to Ubuntu Lucid installed and rest was named by hardware name (which is a default in OpenEmbedded).

How you are naming your machines?

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I am running out of names for computers was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

I created a project at Launchpad to have one place to gather hackers playing with ARM based Chromebook support in their distros.

Project is named “Cross distro support for Samsung Chromebook (ARM based)” and is maintained by team named “Samsung Chromebook (ARM) hackers“. If you want to join then you need to have Launchpad account and then join the team.

Why Launchpad instead of (insert any similar place)? Because I know it and it has very good bugtracker which allows to track other bug trackers. And it does not have to have anything related with Ubuntu…

OK, most of bugs now are about Ubuntu but that’s because I added them. But take a look at bug about ALSA UCM support. It affects our project but also affected “alsa-lib” and “alsa-utils” packages in Ubuntu. There is nothing which could stop us from adding links to Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or other distros bug reports there.

I added PPA there which will get binary packages for “raring” (unless they got merged) and backports for “quantal” and who knows, maybe one day even for “precise”. Due to policy that repository will not be able to build for “armhf” architecture but one of my personal ones can so I will copy packages.

So, who wants to join us? We already have non-Ubuntu people in the team!

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Chromebook hackers: unite! was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

During last days I spent some time in binutils, gcc, gdb, glibc, libffi repositories. All of them have GIT mirrors but most (if not all) are kept in CVS by default.

I used CVS in previous millenium just because I did not know good alternative. But I also know that move from it to other SCM can be painful.

But digging though commits because shortlog view is useless hurts… Exported patches need to be edited to drop all changes to many Changelog files. For libffi it is even better to grab patches from mailing list than from repository…

Life sucks, then you die^Whave to deal with CVS git repos.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I hate CVS based repositories was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

When I bought Samsung Chromebook friend started “nbench” on it. So I did same on my conference laptop. None of devices won…

Idea of testing cpu power was sitting somewhere at back of my head and finally I decided to just run one simple command available on nearly every GNU/Linux based system: “openssl speed”. Sure, on some systems it will use hardware accelerators, on others (or not) some options enabled to get more speed (like ARM assembly version which is not enabled in Debian/Ubuntu systems). But it is something what anyone can run at home.

Table may be hard to decipher so I also give it as Google Docs. It also has few more devices listed and whole tables (one below is for 8192 size samples).

Devices in table are:

• my Intel Core i7-2600K desktop
• my Intel U7300 (ultra low voltage) conference laptop
• Exynos5 Dual powered Samsung ARM Chromebook
• Exynos4 Dual powered Tizen development platform (got rid of it today)
• i.mx515 powered Efika MX Smartbook
• Beaglebone with AM335x cpu
• Sheevaplug (as only armv5te device which can compare with other entries)

Devices were running different versions of OpenSSL under different systems. It is listed in Google Docs document.

Most interesting columns are U7300 and Exynos 5250 ones — 3 years old laptop which I bought for conferences compared to Chromebook. Looks like for next conferences/events I will rather go with Chromebook not UL30A. This will give me one or two hours of battery life less but it is much lighter device at same time. But have to test it first for few days to check is it comfortable enough for daily use.

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Let’s compare some cpu ;) was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Half year ago I got Tizen development platform device. Played a bit with it and then put in a drawer due to other things to do.

Today I looked again at Tizen. Nothing changed. Git repositories still scream “****@#$!$ *** *** you developers!” due to lack of any commits other than code drop bombs.

So if someone (from Europe) wants this device — be first to comment. Sending with DHL and you pay for posting.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Does someone wants Tizen development platform device? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Today I added some Chromebook related packages into my PPA. What is there?

• xserver-xorg-video-armsoc == accelerated Xorg video driver.
• chromium-mali-opengles == OpenGL ES support — works as long as you have ROOT-A partition with Chromium OS cause I mount it to get Mali library.
• libasound2 == ALSA packages with UCM profiles for Chromebook. Say “no more” to fried speakers.

No support from me as usual. I provide packages for just released Ubuntu “quantal” and for development version (“raring”).

Kernel will probably be next. There are instructions from Olof Johansson for it. Not hard task but requires some time. Also requires packaging of vboot tools (for signing kernels) and cgpt (for manipulating GPT).

Another part is touchpad snippet for X11:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
EndSection

Any idea how to package it in friendly way? I thought about “meta-chromebook” package for such tweaks but it does not sound nice to me.

Video acceleration would be great. But this part is beyond me so far.

So, if you have Ubuntu running on your Chromebook (nevermind is it on internal storage or side SD or USB stick) as long as it is at least “quantal” go and grab my packages. They will make use of device much more pleasant. Share any tweaks and tips in comments.

UPDATE: There is a new project related to Chromebook support in distributions. More about it in my blog post about it.

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Chromebook support for Ubuntu was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website