Monthly Archives: January 2015

15 hours on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, in coach

By Geoffrey Morrison Boeing’s new 787-9 promises the next generation of air travel: better efficiency and better passenger comfort. But how does it hold up from the comforts of coach class on one of the longest routes you can take, from L.A. to Melbourne?
…read more

Source:: http://cnet.com.feedsportal.com/c/34938/f/645093/s/4283ea54/sc/10/l/0L0Scnet0N0Cnews0C150Ehours0Eon0Ea0Eboeing0E7870Edreamliner0Ein0Ecoach0C0Tftag0FCAD590Aa51e/story01.htm

      

Astrophysicists Find That Cities Grow Just Like Galaxies 

By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

Astrophysicists Find That Cities Grow Just Like Galaxies

We’ve all looked out at the night sky and wondered at how much the stars look like strings of cities. But there’s more than a passing resemblance—according to a team of astrophysicists who compared the two, there’s a much deeper connection at work. We aren’t just made of stars, we act like them too.

…read more

Source:: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/EfrY3-DFnSU/astrophysicists-find-that-cities-grow-just-like-galaxie-1680462544

      

Samsung smartphones dominate global market, but margin narrows

By Don Reisinger Worldwide, Samsung’s market share drops from 32.5 percent in 2013 to 28 percent in 2014, while competitors, like Apple, maintain or gain ground.

…read more

Source:: http://cnet.com.feedsportal.com/c/34938/f/645093/s/428427ef/sc/2/l/0L0Scnet0N0Cnews0Csamsung0Eglobal0Esmartphone0Eshare0Efalls0Eas0Eapples0Eremains0Estatic0C0Tftag0FCAD590Aa51e/story01.htm

      

Qt Weekly #23: Qt 5.5 enhancements for Linux graphics and input stacks

By Laszlo Agocs

Qt app with widgets and OpenGL on X11

The upcoming Qt 5.5 has received a number of improvements when it comes to running without a windowing system on Linux. While these target mainly Embedded Linux devices, they are also interesting for those wishing to run Qt applications on their desktop machines directly on the Linux console without X11 or Wayland.

We will now take a closer look at the new approach to supporting kernel mode setting and the direct rendering manager, as well as the recently introduced libinput support.

eglfs improvements

In previous versions there used be a kms platform plugin. This is still in place in Qt 5.5 but is not built by default anymore. As features accumulate, getting multiple platform plugins to function identically well gets more complicated. From Qt and the application’s point of view the kms and eglfs platforms are pretty much the same: they are both based on EGL and OpenGL ES 2.0. Supporting KMS/DRM is conceptually no different than providing any other device or vendor-specific eglfs backend (the so-called device hooks providing the glue between EGL and fbdev).

In order to achieve this in a maintainable way, the traditional static, compiled-in hooks approach had to be enhanced a bit. Those familiar with bringing Qt 5 up on embedded boards know this well: in the board-specific makespecs under qtbase/mkspecs/devices one comes across lines like the following:

  EGLFS_PLATFORM_HOOKS_SOURCES = $$PWD/qeglfshooks_imx6.cpp

This compiles the given file in to the eglfs platform plugin. This is good enough when building for a specific board, but is not going to cut it in environments where multiple backends are available and hardcoding any given one is not acceptable. Therefore an alternative, plugin-based approach has been introduced. When looking at the folder qtbase/plugins/egldeviceintegrations after building Qt 5.5, we find the following (assuming the necessary headers and libraries files were present while configuring and building):

  libqeglfs-kms-integration.so
  libqeglfs-x11-integration.so

These, as the names suggest are the eglfs backends for KMS/DRM and X11. The latter is positioned mainly as an internal, development-only solution, although it may also become useful on embedded boards like the Jetson TK1 where the EGL and OpenGL drivers are tied to X11. The former is more interesting for us now: it is the new KMS/DRM backend. And it will be selected and used automatically when no static hooks are specified in the makespecs and the application is not running under X. Alternatively, the plugin to be used can be explicitly …read more

Source:: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2015/01/20/qt-weekly-23-qt-5-5-enhancements-for-linux-graphics-and-input-stacks/