Concept Designs

Currently, scan-copyrights (which uses licensecheck under the hood) is used in Apertis to scan copyright/license notices. This tool has some downsides, thus we are evaluating to use scancode-toolkit instead. A comparison of licensecheck vs scancode is available on the ScanCode’s website, TL;DR: scancode is more accurate but slower. scancode-toolkit has an option to export results as DEP5 format (see GH#472) which is the format currently use by Apertis license tooling. That means, scancode-toolkit is potentially compatible with the rest of the Apertis licensing tooling. [Read More]

PipeWire is de facto the new audio server used by all major Linux distributions (including Debian and Apertis). It provides a low-latency, graph-based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both PulseAudio and JACK. The goal for this task is to evaluate PipeWire in known problematic use-cases with JACK, primarily in supporting multiple audio streams and dynamic switching between them between outputs. [Read More]

Apertis is an Open Source project which consists of multiple parts that are reflected in the current structure of Apertis Gitlab: Packages as the fundamental building blocks of the images Infrastructure to provide the tools and automation to build the images Tests which ensure that Apertis provides high quality standards This structure also shows that tests are one of the pillars of this distribution. The QA process takes advantage of the tests to confirm that the behavior of each component is the expected one. [Read More]

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]