Category Archives: ARM

Maral (Марал), cyrilic mongolian input method for ibus and update of archlinuxARM packages

Cyrillic mongolian input method for Ibus

I made a packet ibus-table-mongolian or Maral (Марал), cyrillique mongolian input method for ibus for ArchLinux (tested on ARM with ArchLinuxARM and x86_64 (with Antergos) in fact in “any”), but I obtain something strange. I will probably have to make a bug report.

Keyboard in this method should be disposition independant, it should be only based on US keyboard and don’t adapt to local keyboard, because the phonetic disposition is totally unrelated to latin caracter phonetic disposition. Mongolian keyboard strangly works perfectly with on ARM architecture, but adapt on locale keyboard on x86_64. The same problem appear on Ubuntu 14.04 for x86_64 that uses a really older version.

The defaut configuration file by author, Ochko, use the former ibus-table 1.3 version :

KEYBOARD_LAYOUT = US_Default

On more recent version, this should be :

LAYOUT = us

I trie both definitions, and each time, I have the same difference between ARM et x86_64. I suppose this is a subtile problem like related to Endianess or something like that ça, but I don’t understand why for? You can still use default linux mongolian keyboard that works perfectly fine, but change between method is not smooth like with ibus.

Update of some archlinuxARM packages

As Entangle version 0.7.0, tool to remote control DSLR and 0AD a18 (a free software realtime strategy game), I updated those packest for ArchlinuxARM.

Download all this stuff

You can download thoses packets and associated PKGBUILD in my dedicated depot-folder.

Linux 4.0 (4.1 on june 25) kernel on Allwinner A20/Cubieboard2

Thanks to the hardware and software development work of AllWinner, to the Linux mainlining effort of the Linux-sunxi community to improve and push driver into main line Linux kernel sources and to the integration work of ArchLinux and ArchLinuxARM communities, the Cubieboard2 (using Allwinner A20 SoC) since this night officially use 4.0 kernel as default with ArchlinuxARM. Before this date an old Linux kernel 3.x branch was used.

* Linux XXX 4.0.5-2-ARCH #1 SMP Fri Jun 12 20:03:44 MDT 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux

This means that :
* Lots of NAND flash can be used for system
* CPU frequency is well managed now
* Most of driver are integrated and probably really stable.

25 june update, 11 days after the 4.0 : A new update occured today with linux kernel 4.1
* Linux XXX 4.1.0-1-ARCH #1 SMP Tue Jun 23 23:24:14 MDT 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux).

Inkscape0.91pre (and archLinuxARM test)

After a fist test of Inkscape 0.91pre, due to the number of changes, and improvement of reactivity, to resolved bugs, better multithread (with OpenMP), etc… I wanted to try it on my Cubieboard2, where it was usable for basic function, but a little slow for some advanced fucntions (like calligraphic tool).

I then compiled it on ArchlinuxARM to test it on my Cubieboard2, I put the paquet in mon micro-reprository ArchlinuxARM, because I still didn’t understand the process to submit it in yaourthouse of AUR (Arch User Repository) or inArchlinuxARM repository.

So then… that’s really fast. This uses both 2 Cortex-A7 CPU (need to be tested on quadcore far faster Cortex-A17 architectures like Rockchip RK3288 like Rikomagic MK802II LE (for Linux Edition), see demo) :). That’s now fully usable, blurs are still slow to draw, but display is relatively asyncrone.

For information, my video is recorded on a x86_64 with application remote display, using X11/tcp (via 100 Mb switch ), this explain some slowness and time shift in display.

Two ArchlinuxARM applications

* Entangle is a realtime DSLR camera remote control, based on gphoto2 I already wrote about 3 years ago.
* Bochs, an x86 emulator, that allows to use x86 system on a window, on ARM :D.

I only recompiled package from the ArchLinux (x86) PKGBUILD files, using makepkg -a and installing missing dependencies with pacman.

You can find my ArchlinuARM compiled packages here, I will try to understand the process to integrate them in ArchlinuxARM AUR.

I put them in my Cubieboard directory, but there should work fine for any ARMv7h plateform where ArchLinuxARM runs :

/cubieboard/ArchlinuxARM/

To install a package from filesystem : pacman -U name_of_the_package.pkg.tar.xz