"Action is the foundational key to all success." ~Pablo Picasso

We are pleased to announce the release of Linaro 12.01. Linaro engineers worked tirelessly on this release to bring hardware accelerated video decoding that is fully supported on the Texas Instruments PandaBoard to users. A set top box based image with the award-winning XBMC media center and enablement for Ubuntu TV are also featured.

Ricardo Salveti, team lead for the Developer Platform at Linaro, details these successful achievements in the following blog posts:

* Ubuntu TV fully accelerated on a PandaBoard with Ubuntu LEB http://rsalveti.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/ubuntu-tv-fully-accelerated-on-a-pa... * Ubuntu TV UI on PandaBoard, and next steps http://rsalveti.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/ubuntu-tv-ui-at-pandaboard-and-next... * Hardware video decode and XBMC support on a PandaBoard with Ubuntu LEB http://rsalveti.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/hw-video-decode-and-xbmc-ubuntu-lin...

Linaro 12.01 contains components delivered by all Linaro Teams -Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform Teams- and brings an abundance of exciting updates and new features which are integrated on top of Android and Ubuntu.

In addition to these highlights and improvements delivered by Linaro engineers, the following updates and features are also available:

* The Multimedia Working Group announces the completion of benchmarking work for Speex codec on Linaro Automated Validation Architecture (LAVA) and an updated version of libjpeg-turbo for Linaro Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), with ICS specific upstream optimizations backported. The team also notes that Android skia-bench numbers have been improved through further optimization of commonly used libjpeg-turbo code paths with results available here. * The Toolchain Working Group now provides pre-built binary versions of Linaro GCC, Linaro GDB and binutils. These binary versions work under generic Linux and Windows and can be used by an end developer to cross-compile programs for either a Linaro Evaluation Build or a bare-metal target. * ST-Ericsson Snowball updates for this release include graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU on Linaro Ubuntu, supports in Linaro U-Boot, and runs test suite on Linaro Android with LAVA.

We encourage everybody to use the 12.01 release. The download links for all images and components are available on our downloads page:

http://www.linaro.org/downloads/

See the detailed highlights of this release to get an overview of what has been accomplished by the Working Groups, Landing Teams and Platform Teams. The release details are linked from the "Details" column for each released artifact on the release information:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1201/Release#Release_Information

Using the Android-based images ==============================

The Android-based images come in three parts: system, userdata and boot. These need to be combined to form a complete Android install. For an explanation of how to do this please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/ImageInstallation

If you are interested in getting the source and building these images yourself please see the following pages:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/GetSource http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/BuildSource

Using the Ubuntu-based images =============================

The Ubuntu-based images consist of two parts. The first part is a hardware pack, which can be found under the hwpacks directory and contains hardware specific packages (such as the kernel and bootloader). The second part is the rootfs, which is combined with the hardware pack to create a complete image. For more information on how to create an image please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/Ubuntu/ImageInstallation

Getting involved ================

More information on Linaro can be found on our websites:

* Homepage: http://www.linaro.org * Wiki: http://wiki.linaro.org

Also subscribe to the important Linaro mailing lists and join our IRC channels to stay on top of Linaro developments:

* Announcements: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-announce * Development: http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev * IRC: #linaro on irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net #linaro-android irc.linaro.org or irc.freenode.net

Known issues with this release ==============================

For any errata issues, please see:

http://wiki.linaro.org/Cycles/1201/Release#Known_Issues

Bug reports for this release should be filed in Launchpad against the individual packages that are affected. If a suitable package cannot be identified, feel free to assign them to:

http://www.launchpad.net/linaro

-- Fathi Boudra, on behalf of the Release Team Linaro Release Manager | Validation Project Manager Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs