Concept Designs

Introduction The aim of this document is to provide a suitable solution for the integration of Robot Framework into the LAVA automated test infrastructure. LAVA doesn’t currently support triggering or executing Robot Framework test suites. Thanks to this integration the coverage test can be extended to cover different test areas by adding additional customized libraries and toolchains. LAVA (Linaro Automation and Validation Architecture) is a continuous integration system for deploying operating systems onto physical and virtual hardware for running tests. [Read More]

Apertis is a distribution that aims to provide solid bases to build products from IOT devices to complex HMI systems. The workflows to build such variety of products involves many different technologies, tools and developers’ background. A common issue during development is the need of high level APIs to interact with the system to allow application developers to focus on their use cases while hiding the complexity of low level system APIs. [Read More]

Apertis is an Open Source project which has been growing sustainable during the past years. This growth also made it spread across different projects and teams, requiring Apertis to improve the tools it uses. In this regard, one issue that prevents Apertis to be really open is the fact that the bug tracking system is only open to maintainers making it hard for the community to report new bugs or to keep track of them. [Read More]

Apertis targets a global community, developing products with international reach, and this necessarily makes it interact with the legislation regulating the export of goods, software and technology. In particular, Apertis can be used on products that fall under the “dual-use” categorization since they can be used for both civilian and military applications. In the context of export controls, it is important to highlight that compliance is a property of a specific product as a whole, and that Apertis being compliant does not automatically translate to products built with Apertis to be compliant. [Read More]

Apertis can be used with a touchscreen only, in this case the user will need an on-screen keyboard to be able to enter information like passwords, URLs, messages. This document outlines the current state of the Wayland protocols dealing with input methods, their implementation status as well as a possible approach for integrating this support into Apertis. Terminology and concepts In Wayland, multiple protocols are involved to allow users to enter text. [Read More]

Apertis is an already mature distribution which fully supports the development of systems for embedded devices as well as a whole infrastructure to make that possible. During its evolution changes are necessary and updating documentation is a key point to making it user friendly. With the goal of having documentation that really expresses the current state of the distribution, having a process and procedure to manage the lifetime of documents is crucial since each new release introduces changes than can lead to documentation to become outdated. [Read More]

Apertis the distribution is derived from Debian, from which it takes its philosophy, tools, workflows and packages. This robust, friendly and mature distribution provides a solid base on which to build an offering to suite the needs of very demanding markets such as the automotive industry. One big difference between Apertis and Debian is that Apertis avoids certain licenses, in order to allow its target market to avoid legal issues. Several licenses are considered unsuitable in parts of Apertis, GPL-3 being the most important one. [Read More]

Introduction As interest and use of Apertis grows it is becoming increasingly important to show the health of the Apertis infrastructure. This enables users to proactively discover the health of the resources provided by Apertis and determine if any issues they may be having are due to Apertis or their infrastructure. Terminology and concepts Hosted: Service provided by an external provider that can typically be accessed over the internet. Self-hosted: Service installed and run from computing resources directly owned by the user. [Read More]

Introduction In accordance to its Open Source License Expectations, Apertis currently ships a very old version of GnuPG which is still released under the GPL-2.0 terms, before the upstream project switched to GPL-3.0. This is problematic in the long term: the purpose of this document is to investigate alternative implementations with licensing conditions that are suitable for Apertis target devices. The use cases for Apertis target images only depend on GnuPG for verification purposes, not for signing or encrypting. [Read More]

Introduction The Apertis project has been experimenting with the use of Eclipse hawkBit as a mechanism for the deployment of system updates and applications to target devices in the field. The current emphasis is being placed on system updates, though hawkBit can also be used to address different software distribution use cases such as to distribute system software, updates and even apps from an app store. Apertis has recently deployed a hawkBit instance into which the image build pipelines are uploading builds. [Read More]