Over last weekend I finally found the time to fiddle with UEFI stuff to make my desktop machine dual boot windows and quantal. Until now it was operating as a pure Windows Gamer PC.

I tried a few times in the last couple of month, but never could allocate the time needed to figure why the installer didn’t properly set the machine up for dual booting.

Now this weekend I found out that I had to create a fat32 partition and mount it manual during install at /boot/efi. With that the Ubuntu installer did the trick of properly adding ubuntu to the efibootmgr and setting things up properly.

Bottom line: All the core work for getting Ubuntu experience right for “normal” UEFI support seem to be there and it’s just going the final and often painful mile of tweaking the install experience to get it right for most cases.

Looking forward to see how the Ubuntu installer team will come up with something smart to streamline this process for everyone and delivering a straight forward install method to get to a nice UEFI based dual boot setup.

Master Zach Pfeffer reiterates the instructions to get Linaro Android Jelly Bea build for Samsung Origen board.

Interesting post, highly relevant for Linaro. Pretty much basics, but I see how we still are too often not good enough at these points so definitely worth repeating and reading…

Be sure to check out this event and mark your personal favorite sessions in your calendar.

All the details you need have been nicely written up in the official announce:

• http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2012/08/07/linaro-announces-virtual-connect-q3-12-13-17-august-2012/

CU next week!

Folks and family asked me for a while to post a more recent photo of myself than those you will see on my randomly outdated and undermaintained social networking profile pics.

So here we go! Fresh from the presses…

I spend some time with liuyq yesterday to write a simple sleep lava test that gives you a small, but powerful tool to add sleep times to your automated android test plan.

Code: https://code.launchpad.net/~liuyq0307/lava-android-test/modification-sleep-helloworld/+merge/110352

Example Android Build Test Plan configuration:

LAVA_TEST_PLAN=sleep,0xbench,v8,skia
SLEEP_OPTION=120

This will give you a nice sleep of 2 minutes rest before starting the 0xbench benchmark. One obvious use case for this is to let your system finish it’s boot process before starting a benchmark run.

More to come!

Couldn’t find a hello world example for our lp:linaro-android-test framework.

Since I learning a bit about how to glue android tests into LAVA right now, thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and be more useful than just talking and submitted a merge request.

Let’s see what reviewers have to say. I am at least happy for the moment.

Curious what was done? Just check out:

bzr branch  lp:~asac/lava-android-test/helloworld-simple
cat helloworld-simple/lava_android_test/test_definitions/helloworld.py

Here comes a very good guide on how to get started integrating new tests into LAVA.

This tutorial gives a quick intro on how to setup a local, virtual test dev environment on your Ubuntu machine and then gives the reader a hands on intro on how to integrate and develop LAVA tests locally. Further, it shows how easy it is to submit such a job to the LAVA lab.

Thanks for Andy Doan and the LAVA team for running the training session and writing it up.

More to follow for sure!

@G+ users: Ever wanted to use shotwell to mass-publish your pics taken with your high resolution camera to picasa? Ever found that you cannot publish using the max pic size that gives G+ users unlimited storage (2048px) easily?

If so: I made a tiny patch for shotwell that allows you to do exactly that and prepared a package for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (precise). You can get it from my ppa: https://edge.launchpad.net/~asac/+archive/ppa with just a few clicks/commands away:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:asac/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install shotwell
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:asac/ppa

Here a screenshot of what it does:

Hope this is useful for some! Have fun!

Update: uploaded an untested backport for Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) to the same ppa. Report back how things go!

Update: trivial patch from my package forwarded to shotwell issue tracker http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5210