In a press release earlier today, Linaro announced the availability of builds of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) supporting accelerated graphics on two of its member’s low cost development boards: the Samsung Origen and ST-Ericsson Snowball boards.
When asked about why this announcement was so exciting for Linaro, its members and developers, Linaro’s Android Team Lead, Zach Pfeffer had this to say, “Until today, independent Android platform developers who wanted to work with accelerated Android had two choices, hack an existing phone or use AOSP’s release or Linaro’s release for the Texas Instrument’s (TI’s) PandaBoard release. Now, independent Android platform developers who want to base products on St-Ericsson’s NovaTM A9500 used in the Snowball dev board or Samsung’s Exynos4210 in the Origen board can do so with an easy-to-use, pre-integrated and tested platform. No more looking through wikis, mining patches or Googling mailing lists, it’s done, tested and available for easy download and building.
“These accelerated builds gave the Samsung Landing Team at Linaro the ability to demonstrate its agility,” said Angus Ainslie, Samsung Landing Team Tech Lead at Linaro. “They were pretty typical multi-team challenges. There’re a lot of inter-dependencies in a codebase this size so it required coordinating parallel lines of development. You need to be able to trust that the other teams are going to be able to deliver at the same time,” continues Ainslie. “The key to the success of this release was real-time communication,” added Ainslie.
In addition to the Snowball from ST-Ericsson, Origen from Samsung and the PandaBoard from TI, Linaro’s Android team and its Freescale landing team have set the groundwork for bringing acceleration to the i.MX53 Quick Start board by stabilizing and improving ICS on the Quick Start board.
Linaro developers also posted video demonstrations of these boards that include:
- Snowball dev board running Linaro’s build of Android ICS with hardware acceleration
- Samsung’s Mali accelerated Origen dev board running Linaro’s build of Android ICS
- Samsung’s Mali accelerated Origen dev board running Linaro’s build of Android ICS (with 3D demo)
Downloads for these accelerated builds for both the Samsung Origen and ST-Ericsson Snowball boards and downloads for the TI PandaBoard and Freescale’s i.MX53 Quick Start board can be found on Linaro’s release site.
This announcement comes just 24 hours before full release of Linaro 11.12. Linaro builds release on a monthly cadence and as Steve Taylor, Linaro’s Marketing Director posted earlier on the ST-Ericsson site, in his post, Watch out for high-speed Snowballs this Christmas, Linaro and its members are bringing you these builds a little early.
To find out more about these exciting new builds, Linaro, its members and how you can join the community please visit the Linaro website.
