This just in: There is an Adobe Flash 10.1 binary by TI to showcase flash on Cortex A8.
Who’s going to be the first to send us a video of Flash working in Firefox or Fennec under Ångström? Or someone could even try if replacing the plugin of the original opera browser would work.
Note: This is most likely not going to work on gen6. Supposedly needs Alsa while gen6 was OSS, also those units are quite RAM-limited.
We’ve been in contact with JBMM over this for a while now on a certain subject. Now they went public and have announced a bounty for the first person to bring an full featured driver for a mobile-broadband-USB modem to gen7/gen8.
We don’t know yet how this will look on gen8 or if maybe Archos did some more work on gen8 than on gen7, but we are eager to see how things develop.
This is more than just compiling a few kernel modules, this needs also actual Android-support.
Here’s the full announcement and in english courtesy of google translation.
We’ve had a busy time and are happy to have the next release – Alpha 2 – for you to play with over the weekend!
Important note: This needs up to date zImage and initramfs to work properly! See further on in the text.
Here’s the Image for you and here’s a md5sum if you want to verify it.
Make sure that your Menu entry contains the words ‘froyo’ or ‘android’ OR the line in menu.lst ends with ‘|0′ – this is needed for now to address the framebuffer fix (see previous post).
We need more developers! There’s plenty of work and not many people! In addition Al Sutton will not be available for the coming weeks. So go ahead, send patches! join us on IRC! file issues! find solutions! help us! etc. etc. pp.
ReleaseNotes/ChangeLog:
Alpha2 is tested and works together with this zImage and this initramfs.
Please install those or preferably most recent before reporting bugs.
Yes, this update has a cool easteregg, and in my humble opinion it lets everything else in this update pale a bit!
Archos actually added a new demuxer (container format) to their latest gen6 firmware.
And sort of a tiny bit of WebM support too on gen7. 
– more on that at the end!
There are no new codecs though, the supported codecs are still the same like before.
But still this enables you to play some more files than before. Namely those that are e.g. encoded with h.264 and then muxed with mkv. (note: resolution restrictions for h.264 still apply, e.g. 720p won’t play. This is a hardware limitation!)
Does that mean that you can now happily download every MKV file and it will play? Nope sorry, especially those so called ‘scene’ files might pose problems if they are high resolution or use high encoder profiles. Can’t verify that don’t have any such files. You’ll have to try yourself, still it will now play more files than before, so in my book it’s a great improvement!
For some free (as in speech AND beer) content you can browse The Webarchive with the keyword ‘matroska’. e.g. http://www.archive.org/details/Rhythmus21
Thanks Archos for keeping your promise!
Now back to WebM on gen7. I’m actually surprised but they added also WebM support to the Matroska demuxer (it is basically a subset of the latter). But it seems like they do not have an VP8 video codec yet, as you can only listen to the vorbis encoded audio track on an gen7 device on gen6 it gives an error.
The missing VP8 support doesn’t come as a total surprise to me though. I have yet to see an good DSP or neon accelerated implementation of VP8. Supposedly TI has something in the works, but nothing has surfaced yet. Will be interesting to see if they add it to gen7 or maybe even gen6 once something surfaces.
Gen6 does report the parameters of an WebM file in the info screen but won’t play it.
PS: This update also works nice with our boot-menu. Should also work fine on converted A5SFR A5G units.