Devices: Librem/Purism, Rockchip, and Axiomtek

• Reflashing the Librem 5

  Reflashing the Librem 5 is the best way to remove your personal data and put the phone back into factory defaults. Warning, this procedure will completely erase everything on the device! Make a backup beforehand! The Librem 5 gets reflashed from a separate 64-bit x86 computer running PureOS (or booted from the live PureOS disk).

• Getting Purism News – Purism

  We have a lot of irons in the fire at Purism whether it’s hardware development like the Librem 5, Librem 5 USA, or Librem 14, new products like the Librem Mini v2, or the wide range of software projects we maintain at https://source.puri.sm/. As a result, each week there is news on at least one of these fronts. We often get questions about the status of various projects, in particular from customers who are part of a crowdfunding campaign who want to know the answer to the all-important question: when will I get my device? In this post we will cover all the different ways you can stay up to date on Purism news.

• Rockchip RV1126 AI Camera SoC features 2.0 TOPS NPU, promises 250ms fast boot

  Rockchip RV1126 EVB V13 can help with evaluation and early development, but I could not find limited information includes a boot log showing it running Linux 4.9.111.

• PoE-enabled Apollo Lake system triggers machine vision

  Axiomtek’s compact “MVS100-323-FL” machine vision computer combines Apollo Lake with 3x GbE ports — 2x with PoE — plus lighting controls, trigger I/O, isolated DIO, and mini-PCIe. Axiomtek has previously launched vision I/O computers based on Intel’s 7th Gen Kaby Lake with products like the MVS900-511-FL, IPS962-512-PoE, and IPS960-511-PoE. The new MVS100-323-FL is a far more compact system with a slower, but more energy efficient Apollo Lake processor. [...] The MVS100-323-FL is powered by Intel’s quad-core x5-E3940, clocked at 1.6GHz. No OS support was listed, but Linux and Windows are almost certainly supported. Axiomtek’s AMS.AXView software is also available.

Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi and Arduino

• Introducing the Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontroller - IoT Tech Trends

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation comes through again with another innovative device. Already well-known for its series of single-board computers, the company has announced the Raspberry Pi Pico, a microcontroller that costs a shockingly low $4. Adding to the interest, the company is using its own RP2040 chip for it, meaning it’s making its own silicon, just like Apple with its M1.

 

• Kernel 5.10.9 compiled for Pi4

  EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, version 2.6, has the 5.10.4 Linux kernel. I have now compiled the 5.10.9 kernel, that will be used in the next release of Easy.

 

• Fixed compile of Samba without krb5 in OE

  EasyOS on the Pi4 does not have samba, as compile failed in OE. Yes, I could compile it in a running EasyOS on the Pi4, but would rather fix it in OE. I have a 'samba_%.bbappend' file, the main objective being to remove the 'pam' and 'krb5' dependencies. I worked on this recipe this morning. The problem is that instead of 'krb5', the internal 'heimdahl' is used, and this compiles two binaries, that are then executed during compile. The problem is that the binaries are compiled for the target system, in this case aarch64, whereas the build system is x86_64, so the binaries cannot run. OE does have a mechanism to handle this. It is possible to compile 'samba-native', that is, samba compiled to run on the build-system, and then use the two binaries from that when compile 'samba'. Fine, except that exactly how to do this is very poorly documented. The official documentation is very vague. A couple of years ago, I bought a book, "Embedded Linux Systems with the Yocto Project", but found that it also said hardly anything about this. I consider this to be an important topic, yet it seems that many OE experts don't know much about it either.

    

• Arduino Blog » Turn your staircase into a flaircase with this LED system

  If you live in a house with stairs and have to traipse up and down at night, it’s best to have some sort of light that guides you. Although a cell phone can work just fine, or you could likely activate bright overhead lighting, creator MagicManu devised an automatic and progressive solution to illuminate his path instead. MagicManu’s system knows when someone is there using PIR sensors arranged at both ends, and only activates if it’s dark enough thanks to a photoresistor. The entire setup is controlled by an Arduino Nano, while two potentiometers adjust light sensitivity and duration of ignition.

Red Hat’s Disruption of CentOS Unleashes Storm of Dissent

Five weeks after angering much of the CentOS Linux developer community by unveiling controversial changes to the no-cost CentOS operating system, Red Hat has unveiled alternatives for affected users that give them several options for using existing Red Hat products. But for many users of CentOS Linux, the Red Hat options won’t solve the huge problems that were created for them when Red Hat announced Dec. 8 that CentOS would no longer include a stable version with a long, steady future. Instead, CentOS will now only be offered as a free CentOS Stream operating system which will be a rolling release with frequent updates, essentially turning it into a beta OS that is no longer suitable for reliable production workloads. For users who have deployed CentOS throughout the internet, data centers, corporate and business uses and more, this is a potentially major blow. Also: Fedora program update: 2021-03

The Demise of Chromium as Free Software

• This is why Leading Linux Distros going to remove Chromium from their Official Repositories

  Jochen Eisinger from Google team mentioned in a discussion thread that they will be banning sync support system of Chromium. This lead to lot of frustration in the Linux Dev community & rage against googles sudden decision. This Decision can kill small browser projects & lead the web to single browser monopoly i.e. Google Chrome! As a result of the googles decision multiple distros are strictly considering removal of Chromium from their official repositories. Leading distros like Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian, Slackware & OpenSUSE have stated that if the sync support goes down from google they will definitely remove chromium from their official repositories.

• Chromium 88 removes Flash support [Ed: But DRM added]

  I uploaded a set of chromium packages to my repository today. Chromium 88.0.4324.96 sources were released two days ago. The release notes on the Google Chrome Releases Blog mention 36 security fixes with at least one being tagged as “critical” but the article does not mention that Flash support has been entirely removed from Chromium now. Adobe’s Flash was already actively being blocked for a long time and you had to consciously enable Flash content on web pages, but after Adobe discontinued Flash on 1st of January 2021 it was only a matter of time before support in web browsers would be removed as well. Let’s also briefly revisit the topic of my previous post – Google will remove access to Chrome Sync for all community builds of the open source variant of their Chrome browser: Chromium… thereby crippling it as far as I am concerned.

• Chrome 89 Preparing To Ship With AV1 Encoder For WebRTC Usage [Ed: Massive patent trap]

  Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser. Going back to 2018 there's been AV1 decode support within the browser when wanting to enjoy content encoded in this royalty-free, modern codec. But now for Chrome 89 is coming AV1 encode support. AV1 encode support is being added for the WebRTC use-case for real-time conferencing. Web applications like WebEx, Meet, and Duo (among others) already support using AV1 for better compression efficiency, improved low-bandwidth handling, and greater screen sharing efficiency. While hardware-based AV1 encoding isn't yet common, Chrome Linux/macOS/Windows desktop builds are adding the ability to use CPU-based AV1 encoding.