Covid-19: Bootlin proposes online sessions for all its courses

Tux working on embedded Linux on a couchLike most of us, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, you may be forced to work from home. To take advantage from this time confined at home, we are now proposing all our training courses as online seminars. You can then benefit from the contents and quality of Bootlin training sessions, without leaving the comfort and safety of your home. During our online seminars, our instructors will alternate between presentations and practical demonstrations, executing the instructions of our practical labs.

At any time, participants will be able to ask questions.

We can propose such remote training both through public online sessions, open to individual registration, as well as dedicated online sessions, for participants from the same company.

Public online sessions

We’re trying to propose time slots that should be manageable from Europe, Middle East, Africa and at least for the East Coast of North America. All such sessions will be taught in English. As usual with all our sessions, all our training materials (lectures and lab instructions) are freely available from the pages describing our courses.

Our Embedded Linux and Linux kernel courses are delivered over 7 half days of 4 hours each, while our Yocto Project, Buildroot and Linux Graphics courses are delivered over 4 half days. For our embedded Linux and Yocto Project courses, we propose an additional date in case some extra time is needed to complete the agenda.

Here are all the available sessions. If the situation lasts longer, we will create new sessions as needed:

Type Dates Time Duration Expected trainer Cost and registration
Embedded Linux (agenda) Sep. 28, 29, 30, Oct. 1, 2, 5, 6 2020. 17:00 – 21:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (San Francisco) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Embedded Linux (agenda) Nov. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 2020. 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris), 8:00 – 12:00 (New York) 28 h Michael Opdenacker 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux kernel (agenda) Nov. 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 28 h Alexandre Belloni 829 EUR + VAT* (register)
Yocto Project (agenda) Nov. 30, Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Maxime Chevallier 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Buildroot (agenda) Dec. 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Thomas Petazzoni 519 EUR + VAT* (register)
Linux Graphics (agenda) Dec. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2020 14:00 – 18:00 (Paris time) 16 h Paul Kocialkowski 519 EUR + VAT* (register

* VAT: applies to businesses in France and to individuals from all countries. Businesses in the European Union won’t be charged VAT only if they provide valid company information and VAT number to Evenbrite at registration time. For businesses in other countries, we should be able to grant them a VAT refund, provided they send us a proof of company incorporation before the end of the session.

Each public session will be confirmed once there are at least 6 participants. If the minimum number of participants is not reached, Bootlin will propose new dates or a full refund (including Eventbrite fees) if no new date works for the participant.

We guarantee that the maximum number of participants will be 12.

Dedicated online sessions

If you have enough people to train, such dedicated sessions can be a worthy alternative to public ones:

  • Flexible dates and daily durations, corresponding to the availability of your teams.
  • Confidentiality: freedom to ask questions that are related to your company’s projects and plans.
  • If time left, possibility to have knowledge sharing time with the instructor, that could go beyond the scope of the training course.
  • Language: possibility to have a session in French instead of in English.

Online seminar details

Each session will be given through Jitsi Meet, a Free Software solution that we are trying to promote. As a backup solution, we will also be able to Google Hangouts Meet. Each participant should have her or his own connection and computer (with webcam and microphone) and if possible headsets, to avoid echo issues between audio input and output. This is probably the best solution to allow each participant to ask questions and write comments in the chat window. We also support people connecting from the same conference room with suitable equipment.

Each participant is asked to connect 15 minutes before the session starts, to make sure her or his setup works (instructions will be sent before the event).

How to register

For online public sessions, use the EventBrite links in the above list of sessions to register one or several individuals.

To register an entire group (for dedicated sessions), please contact training@bootlin.com and tell us the type of session you are interested in. We will then send you a registration form to collect all the details we need to send you a quote.

You can also ask all your questions by calling +33 484 258 097.

Questions and answers

Q : Should I order hardware in advance, our hardware included in the training cost?
R : No, practical labs are replaced by technical demonstrations, so you will be able to follow the course without any hardware. However, you can still order the hardware by checking the “Shopping list” pages of presentation materials for each session. This way, between each session, you will be able to replay by yourself the labs demonstrated by your trainer, ask all your questions, and get help between sessions through our dedicated Matrix channel to reach your goals.

Q: Why just demos instead of practicing with real hardware?
A: We are not ready to support a sufficient number of participants doing practical labs remotely with real hardware. This is more complicated and time consuming than in real life. Hence, what we we’re proposing is to replace practical labs with practical demonstrations shown by the instructor. The instructor will go through the normal practical labs with the standard hardware that we’re using.

Q: Would it be possible to run practical labs on the QEMU emulator?
R: Yes, it’s coming. In the embedded Linux course, we are already offering instructions to run most practical labs on QEMU between the sessions, before the practical demos performed by the trainer. We should also be able to propose such instructions for our Yocto Project and Buildroot training courses in the next months. Such work is likely to take more time for our Linux kernel course, practical labs being closer to the hardware that we use.

Q: Why proposing half days instead of full days?
A: From our experience, it’s very difficult to stay focused on a new technical topic for an entire day without having periodic moments when you are active (which happens in our public and on-site sessions, in which we interleave lectures and practical labs). Hence, we believe that daily slots of 4 hours (with a small break in the middle) is a good solution, also leaving extra time for following up your normal work.

“Porting Linux on ARM” seminar road show in France

CaptronicIn December 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar “Porting Linux on ARM” in Toulouse (France) in partnership with french organization Captronic. We published the materials used for the seminar shortly after the event.

We are happy to announce that this seminar will be given in four different cities in France over the next few months:

  • In Montpellier, on April 14th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • In Clermont-Ferrand, on April 27th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • In Brive, on April 28th from 9 AM to 1 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near ChambĂ©ry, on May 25th from 9:30 AM to 5/30 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near Bordeaux, on June 2nd from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.
  • Near Nancy, on June 16th from 2 PM to 6 PM. See this page for details.

The seminar is delivered in French, and the event is free after registration. The speaker, Alexandre Belloni, has worked on porting botloaders and the Linux kernel on a number of ARM platforms (Atmel, Freescale, Texas Instruments and more) and is the Linux kernel co-maintainer for the RTC subsystem and the support of the Atmel ARM processors.

Seminar “Porting Linux on an ARM board”, materials available

Porting Linux on an ARM boardOn December 10th 2015, Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni gave a half-day seminar on the topic of Porting Linux on an ARM board in Toulouse, France. This seminar covers topics like porting the bootloader, understanding the concept of the Device Tree, writing Linux device drivers and more. With ~50 persons from various companies attending and lots of questions from the audience, this first edition has been very successful, which shows an increasing interest for using Linux on ARM platforms in the industry.

We are now publishing the 220 slides materials from this seminar, available in PDF format. Like all our training materials, this material is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows everyone to re-use it for free, provided the derivative works are released under the same license. We indeed re-used quite extensively parts of our existing training materials for this half-day seminar.

We plan to give this half-day seminar in other locations in France in 2016. Contact us if you are interested in organizing a similar seminar in your area (we are happy to travel!).

Android seminar slides

Android robotWe have delivered two seminars about Android during the last quarter of 2012. The seminars were held in Belfort and Grenoble, France, and were organized by Captronic, a French public program to support innovation in electronic systems.

This one day seminar targets people who wish to understand the constraints and implications of using Android in embedded products, and know the steps to follow. The seminar is led by Maxime Ripard, Bootlin’sAndroid expert. Maxime is also the creator of Bootlin’sAndroid system development course.

Agenda

Morning

  • General introduction to Android
  • Opportunities to use Android in embedded systems which are neither phones nor tablets
  • Details on Android’s architecture and how to customize it:
    • Source code and compiling
    • Android changes to the Linux kernel
    • Bootloaders for Android
    • Supporting new hardware
    • Android filesystem layout
    • Android native layers and calling a C program to access specific hardware
    • Introduction to application development
    • Customizing the system
    • Using adb (Android Debug Bridge) for debugging and device remote access
    • Advice and resources

Afternoon

  • Completing the morning presentations (if necessary)
  • Demonstrating multiple aspects of system development with Android:
    • Getting sources and compiling
    • Android emulator demonstration
    • Starting Android on an electronic board with an ARM OMAP3530 processor, using a serial console.
    • Adding support for specific buttons. “Back” button example.
    • Using adb: installing, accessing system logs, accessing a command line interface on the device, exchanging files with the PC.
    • Customizing the system: change the product name, the default wallpaper, add new properties.
    • To access specific hardware (such as a USB device), development of a native library and accessing this functionality from the Android framework through a specific class and JNI library.
    • Describing an application that allows to control a USB device.
    • Questions and answers

Presentation slides

Note: see updates to these materials.

Creative commonsPresentation slides are available in PDF and LaTeX source formats. As usual, they are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 license. This means that you can reuse and modify them according to your own needs.

If you are interested in having one of us run such a seminar on your own part of the world, giving the audience the opportunity to ask all the questions they can have on the use of Android in embedded systems, don’t hesitate to contact us.