Hardware

A while back I made an official 0.5.0 release for PiBox which I announced on the Raspberry Pi Forums. Since then I've made significant advances in preparing PiBox for use as a media server in my travel trailer. Some of the features I've recently implemented include: Support for running as […]

PiBox: 0.5.0 released, many new features since

Mon August 19, 2013 in Hardware / Linux / omapfb / PiBox / Raspberry Pi / X11 / XBMC (updated 3903 days ago)

I'm still a Fedora user, even after years of releases that seem to cause more headaches than they solve. I understand it's a bleeding edge distro. But at the current rate of change it's bound to bleed out by the end of the year. Systemd is a pain for me […]

F19 upgrade: is this really getting better?

Tue August 06, 2013 in Fedora / GTK+ / Linux / NVidia / PulseAudio / X11 / XFce

If you’re playing with the idea of getting into embedded Linux, you might start with the most basic question: what does embedded Linux mean? In the not so distant past that was a little easier to define. An embedded board was typically physically smaller or at least used a very […]

What makes it embedded Linux?

Thu January 17, 2013 in BeagleBoard / BeagleBox / PiBox / XBMC / XBMC (updated 4119 days ago)

I’ve finally got a build for PiBox that supports a proper XBMC build. The latter took some finagling to force a cross compile that didn’t pick up any bits and pieces from the build system. So it’s all checked in and the builds placed on the SD card and it’s […]

PiBox / BeagleBox update: lost keyboard access?

Tue January 15, 2013 in BeagleBoard / BeagleBox / PiBox / XBMC (updated 4119 days ago)

It took some work, but I finally have SGX fully integrated into the build and have BeagleBox booting into an X session that can run opengl apps. I ran the SGX demos and they all seem to run fine. A couple showed frame rates betweeen 45 and 52 frames per […]

BeagleBox: SGX fully integrated

Mon September 03, 2012 in BeagleBox / Hardware / omapfb / Open Source / X11 tagged BeagleBox / SGX

So I've integrated TI's SGX package into the BeagleBox build. What this does is to run the SGX package's Makefile-based build which in turn installs a bunch of stuff from the archive into another directory. This directory will then contain a bunch of files which need to be installed again, […]

BeagleBox: SGX “install” script sucks

Fri August 31, 2012 in BeagleBox / Hardware / Linux / omapfb / Open Source / Software Development / X11 tagged BeagleBox / script / SGX

My media server died this past week. Actually, just the hard drive. It was running Fedora 14 and needed to be updated anyway. This server hooks into my Sony Bravia TV via HDMI using an nVidia GeForce 9800GT. After installing Fedora 16 to a new drive, I loaded kmod-nvidia and […]

Media servers: Flash, Hulu, Amazon, ARM and Fedora 16

Sun July 29, 2012 in Android / BeagleBox / Fedora / Firefox / Hardware / Linux / NVidia / omapfb / Open Source / Software Development / TV / Via Motherboards / X11 / XBMC tagged adobe / amazon / Android / ARM / beagleboard / BeagleBox / Bravia / drm / Fedora / firefox / Flash / flash player / flash player plugin / hulu / media servers

I'm installing on an Asus A53S at work using Fedora 14. I won't use Fedora 15 until they clean up the GNOME 3 fiasco (I want my old workflow, not something cool just to be cool). The installation fails when it tries to launch X. If you don't want a […]

Quick note: Installing Fedora on an Asus Intel i5 w/ ...

Fri August 05, 2011 in Fedora / General / Hardware / Intel / Linux / NVidia tagged Asus / Fedora / framebuffer / framebuffer driver / intel / nvidia / Open Source / usefbx / VESA / xdriver (updated 4646 days ago)

This past weekend I completed verification that the build works on Ubuntu (see below). In this process I also cleaned up the component builds a bit, added documentation and verified that a build from scratch (no local archives) works correctly. And it does. The resulting packages provide a booting system […]

BeagleBox: Ubuntu support ready, stable build but no video playback ...

Wed April 20, 2011 in BeagleBox / Hardware / Linux / Software Development tagged BeagleBox / BUI / ubuntu / video playback

I've managed to build and boot Buildroot 2011.02 using the 2.6.32 Arago kernel and Crosstool-NG 1.8.2 with GCC 4.4.3 and uClibc 0.9.30.2. The build works just as well as the older Buildroot 2010.11 I had been using, but there is a problem with where fonts are being installed. For some […]

BeagleBox: Buildroot 2011.02 progress (toward video playback), Ubuntu and Linaro

Sat April 09, 2011 in BeagleBox / Hardware / Linux / omapfb / Open Source / X11 tagged arago / ARM / beagleboard / BeagleBox / buildroot / cross compiler / crosstool-ng / DSP / gcc / kvm / Linaro / Linux / omap / OpenEmbedded / poky / rxvt / SGX / sysroot / ubuntu / uclibc / video playback / xfont / xfont_font-adobe / xfont_font-util / yocto (updated 4768 days ago)

A recent thread on the Buildroot mailing list about the use of Buildroot in practice got me thinking about why I created BeagleBox and similar systems at work. So I wrote up a paper on it and put it on my wiki. Comments and criticicisms are welcome. Related posts cdtools, […]

Metabuilds for Embedded Development

Sun March 27, 2011 in BeagleBox / Hardware / Linux tagged beagleboard / BeagleBox / buildroot / crosstool-ng / Development / embedded development / metabuild / Metabuilds

Sitting around this weekend taking care of one of my pups (Bailey, who just had TPLO surgery to fix a torn ACL) I decided to take a deeper look at the problem with the cross toolchain supporting NEON instructions. I did a few more Google searches and found the Linaro […]

BeagleBox: fixed NEON problems in cross toolchain

Sat March 12, 2011 in BeagleBox / Hardware / Linux / omapfb / Software Development / X11 tagged BeagleBox / neon / toolchain

Michael J. Hammel

Building a better today…because tomorrow is in question…