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After a somewhat lengthy session trying to get a Neo to boot from and image on SD I’ve finally managed to get it working. It took so long because u-boot is broken. Having taken the risk of flashing u-boot many times I finally found one that works properly and, after flashing, the Neo booted perfectly from SD. Sadly for one person, also trying to achieve the same on their Neo, they have a brick after flashing a bad u-boot. Incidentally, when I say ‘booted perfectly’ what I really mean is it part booted and then I got a kernel panic. This was caused by it not being able to mount the root partition which although I’d created as ext2 didn’t work. A quick reformat as ext3, a recopy of the appropriate files, and it booted without issue.

The good news is that I now have a dual booting Neo with Qtopia and Openmoko, although I don’t know how badly booting like this this will affect the current very poor battery life. At least I can now test either as I want without flashing I might even buy myself a bigger SD card and partition it off and have a number of bootable versions, who knows maybe Android will get on there.

Tagged with: neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • qtopia • u-boot
November 12, 2007 9:42

It’s true. There is no GooglePhone. What we are going to get is an SDK, Android, which will hopefully allow us to build quickly and simply. Sadly the licensing still allows devices to be locked down tight, so don’t expect to see a flood of Opensource devices hitting the streets any time soon.

Since the SDK isn’t due to be available until the 12th November 2007, I’ll hold back for now. Once I have my paws on it I’ll let you know what I think. As it stands I don’t see it as any sort of challenge to Openmoko, in fact I think it adds strength to it.

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Tagged with: android • Google Phone • gphone • openmoko
November 10, 2007 17:10

Previously I’d talked about slimrio, software that enabled the DDAR/Rio to talk to Slimserver. Now that I have it installed I can say that it works, to some degree. The slimrio software was a doddle to install, basically requiring nothing more that untaring the slimrio root filesystem over the existing one. Rebooting the DDARs resulted in a rather swish looking logo sliding in from the right, followed by some author info, also sliding in. This, I thought, was a good sign. Unfortuneately the DDAR screen is only a fraction of the size of a real Slim devices player so everything beyond that looks dire. It’s usable, but my wife is never going to like it or get used to it at all. Thankfully the solution appears to be a Nokia 770 web tablet. The slimserver allows its layout to be configured one of those options is Touch, making the software very usable from a Nokia 770.

Once I’d got AlienBBC installed and the streams set up everything worked as planned. While the interface isn’t perfect it certainly makes slimserver usable with the DDARs. I can now put my plans to buy the overpriced $299 Slim devices players on hold, in favour of the 5 DDARs I have and a couple of the, now reduced in price, Nokia 800’s.

Tagged with: DDAR • Nokia • Rio • slimp3 • slimserver
November 10, 2007 17:02

For the longest time I’ve been using a selection of Rio Receivers, affectionately known as the DDAR (Dell Digital Audio Receivers, because Dell briefly sold them too) for my mp3 collection. Initially I had to use the supplied Windows server software, it was almost completely useless with a collection the size of mine and couldn’t be run as a service, so I ended up trying another application, MediaNet. It was streets ahead. I even wrote a short review for automatedhome. The problem was, however, that when I moved to solely using Linux I couldn’t run it. I suppose I could have created a VMWare image and run it in that, but that wasn’t really an acceptable solution for me. In the end I reverted to the very basic solution provided by Jeff Mock. It worked, but was just very very basic.

So today, as I learn of SlimRio I’m very pleased indeed. SlimRio allows you to use the slimserver software to control and play music on the Rio / DDAR. I can’t wait to restart my music server build project based on slimserver, rios and the odd Nokia 770

Tagged with: DDAR • Rio • slimp3 • slimserver
October 25, 2007 12:26

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying out a series of applications, the two are just a bit of fun really although I suppose they could be a little useful. Earlier this week I had been messing about with SuperKaramba which I eventually removed after it decided it was going to delete some files after I’d modified them, fixing a couple of bugs. The concept of SuperKaramba is fairly sound, I just worry about why I suddenly lost an entire plugin folder for it. Maybe it didn’t like my modifications, I’ll never know. I also noticed that my cpu usage never went below 30% – It had to go, but it was at least interesting to have a look at and it did introduce me to a bit of Python, something I’ve been avoiding looking at for some time now. I haven’t got anything against Python, it’s just yet another language I’m going to have to learn, along with Ruby – but I have no idea what the ‘on Rails’ bit is about, I’m assuming it’s similar to LAMP, although I prefer it in its xampp form.

Gltail is a little Ruby application that allows you to look at your logs in 3d. I know it’s not very ‘linux shell’ but it is fun to see. You also get a good idea of which files, images etc are attracting the most attention. A stream of spheres spits out from each client or server.

The sphere’s get bigger and smaller depending on a number of factors, but generally the amount of traffic . There are a number of plugins available for it to allow the monitoring of things like apache logs, or mysql queries. The thing I liked most was that it connects to remote servers over ssh and can use keys. There are a couple of flash movies on the gltail page, one showing when the author was ‘slashdotted’. Gltail is a Ruby application, so it’s another opportunity for learning what I’m going to start calling YAFL – Yet Another F&%$ing Language. I enjoyed throwing a few logs at it to see how well it managed, but could never really compare to the author’s ‘slashdotting’.

Tagged with: opensource • software
October 20, 2007 10:46