Posts by chewitt

    I usually see this PEBKAC error when people visit GitHub and download things using the "save as zip" function; which gives them a zipped copy of the GitHub repo which is not the same thing as the zipped add-on they were hoping for.

    For further help you will need to specify the add-ons and state where you obtain the files from.

    It could be a successful crowdfunding project if someone dares to dive in. There is a lot of people being unhappy with closed nature of Mali drivers.

    The majority of people who are unhappy have no useful skills for the task. The people with useful skills for the task typically have no knowledge of ARM Mali internals and thus aren't likely to succeed at the task; which makes it an unattractive challenge. The people with useful knowledge of Mali internals are all ARM employees who signed NDA's that result in dismissal for gross misconduct if they share anything. It all sounds like a right negative whinge (and it is) but finding people who are prepared to invest the time/effort in this stuff is hard; hence the lima project ran aground some time ago.

    urghh..

    edit: been reading more and it seems there is more needed directly from amlogic. could anyone point me to something i can read that shows what exactly is needed, and how the drivers on that link aren't whats needed?

    If you have to ask how ARM video licensing works (technically) there is no chance of you making a positive and insightful contribution to the "what's needed" debate. So I will summarise the problem and options (again):

    Problem: The open-source drivers require a closed-source blob provided by ARM that is tethered to an unknown combination of hardware identifiers specific to its IP licensee (Amlogic). Options are:

    a) Amlogic opens their chequebook and licenses the closed-source libmail.so library from ARM. This is not cheap. In Chinese culture it is impolite to say no, which is probably why the CTO of Amlogic smiled nicely, didn't say no, and also didn't provide any affirmative answers when I explicitly asked about plans to license S912 fbdev drivers in a face-to-face meeting earlier this year.

    b) ARM suddenly develops a sense of philanthropy and gives us a free universal libmali.so driver to use; thus breaking the entire ARM licensing business model. I'm an optimist, but I also have a tiny suspicion it's not going to happen.

    c) Reverse engineering of libmali.so allows us to defeat the licensing system used by ARM and hack a works-on-all library. It's not theoretically impossible and we already poked sticks at things. Despite being an optimist I suspect the $billion-dollar ARM licensing machine knows more about protecting its IP from reverse engineering than we know about reverse engineering.

    d) The fully open-source "lima" driver manages to advance a decade in code maturity and provides a viable alternative driver. Considering the lima project is basically dead for the last two years; this is something I'm not optimistic about.

    If you are seeing %H there is a custom samba.conf in use and you need to update it to be based on the new Samba4 template. Basically there is a conflict with Samba 3 configuration and this causes Samba to not start correctly. There is a comment in the release notes that directs people to do this, but as nobody reads release notes I guess most will discover it the hard way.

    There is a wireless hotspot feature that can be enabled in the LE settings add-on if you have a compatible wireless card (drivers need to support AP mode). If that's not what you're looking for you need to explain your definition of ad-hoc network.