daniel.haxx.se

After a very long time of work, a very very long time since these devices were introduced on the mp3 player market, the hard working guys from freemyipod.org have produced something on yet another device. This is the same group that previously was called linux4nano and worked so long and fiercely to get code running on the 2nd generation iPod Nano and the 4th generation iPod Nano.

At the end of December 2010, Michael “TheSeven” Sparmann announced that he was running custom code including music playback on the iPod Classic. The (sometimes) so called 6th generation.

Robert Menes spiced up the story today by showing us a live picture of a Classic device that now actually is running Rockbox:

Awesome work Michael, truly impressive. I hope a lot of Classic owners soon will be able to try out Rockbox for real. Rockbox is said to not yet be very stable or functional, so there’s a lot of room for more hackers and developers to join in and help us improve!

It’s green, and straight out of the FedEx shipping box it certainly is very wrinkled. This is the Google Summer Of Code tshirt 2010. I got it from a friendly delivery person just a couple of minutes ago.

I got it for my participation in the gsoc program for the Rockbox project. I’ve been an admin and mentor previous years, and this year I co-admined our group’s efforts.

Thanks!

I was asked what the Nordic Free Software Award that I received last year meant to me. This was my response that I now repost here for the public to see:

To me, the NFSA is a recognition from my own kind. A really big thumbs-up from within my own team. From fellow hackers who know.

In a world where we spend lots and lots of time alone in front of screens during long dark hours, where most of what you do is just silently pushed into source code repositories or consumed by eager downloaders distributed all over the world, getting that kind of positivism is invaluable.

I found it to not only be a very big ego boost, but it also really ignited my desire to do more, to reach further and to prove that my receiving of the award is the beginning and not the end of what I am set to do in our free software world. In my particular case it was a primary factor behind the start of the Foss-sthlm network that I co-started not long after I got the award. I’ve pushed foss-sthlm forwards during this year with several meetings with a hundred or more attendees.

Getting weird looks from outsiders or a thank you from the occasional user is fun, but getting an award from people who actually know what you might have done and what it takes to do it, is priceless.

I’m perfectly aware that I am the super-nerd. I’m not the social guy. I’m not the person who unite crowds or inspire teams to create miracles. I’m a software developer and I design and create code. Lots of it. I debate technical details, protocols and choices on mailing lists. Lots of them. I share as much as possible of all that of course and I’m thrilled that what I do is considered this good and is appreciated to this extent.

Everyone doing volunteer work wants to get recognition for their efforts. I got it. Thank you!

During the social event at FSCONS 2010 when we announced the winner of this year and handed him his prizes, I was also given the prize I never received last year because I wasn’t around at the actual award ceremony then. And of course, these guys love puns so…

From the left: a box with rocks (for my work on Rockbox), a transformer toy (I don’t quite recall the reason for that) and curlers (for my work on curl). Click on the image to see it in full resolution, it is taken with my crappy mobile camera.

As mentioned before, I visited the event arranged on Software Freedom Day 2010 here in Stockholm Sweden by the Swedish Linux Foundation (Svenska Linuxföreningen). There, I did a one hour talk in Swedish about how we reverse engineer mp3 players in the Rockbox project, and then I ventured in and told them about Rockbox, what it is and what it does etc. I’ve done basically this talk before. I got lots of good questions and general feedback; I believe the audience mostly appreciated it.

Linus Nielsen Feltzing and I founded Haxx a long time ago, so therefore it is extra fun to welcome him to join me and Björn to work full-time for our small but already now skill-packed company. Starting December this year, Linus will do all his consultancy and contract work wearing his Haxx hat and no other. Employee number three.

He comes from an employment at the same consultant company I was employed by before (and Björn was too a while ago). With this addition Haxx is now having three full-time consultants with more than 20 years of experience each within software development and embedded systems. We have a long and thorough experience in Linux and networks, in embedded and in larger systems.

Björn and I originally got to know Linus back in 1988 when we visited a “copy-party” in Alvesta Sweden. There we (the C64 demo group named Horizon) competed against the other teams in the demo competition. We won the competition with our demo “Love This Now” while the fellows in Microsystems Digital Technology (MDT) came at second place with their “Bonanza“.

MDT consisted of two persons, and one of them was Linus.

After Alvesta, Linus and Jörgen (the other MDT member) joined Horizon and we’ve known each other since. We’ve worked on the same companies since the late 90s something until the day last year when I started working full-time for Haxx.

Linus is a hardcore embedded developer, working close to hardware and the OS, writing primarily C and assembler code. He has worked a lot with various RTOSes and Linux.

Linus is also known as one of the founders of the Rockbox project together with me and Björn.

I’ll be brief:

On the Software Freedom Day 2010 (September 18th), the guys in “The Swedish Linux Association” (Svenska Linuxföreningen) are organizing a day with talks and presentations about Linux and foss related subjects, which they call Linuxträff 2010. It takes place in Stockholm city, Sweden.

At that event, in the 11:00 – 12:00 time slot, you will be able to see and hear me do a little talk about Rockbox and reverse engineering to get free software on consumer electronics.

See you there!

Hey

In February I wrote about how I think Rockbox’s future involves existing as an app (on Android), and it was also this year accepted as a gsoc project for Rockbox.

In June I got somewhat noticed when Joe Brockmeier wrote about Rockbox on lwn.net and included a lot of references and talk about my post and the app situtation.

Today, Thomas “kugel” Martitz closed the circle by announcing on IRC and mail that he has indeed made Rockbox on Android play its first sounds and he is indeed progressing in a good direction.

While I’m told the current state is rough and there’s no installer or anything yet, I’m sure I share the view of lots of others that this is a great moment in the Rockbox history. A milestone. Thanks Thomas, I hope your work continues equally good and that we get an app to try out at the end of the summer or so.

Thomas’ git repo is here: http://repo.or.cz/w/kugel-rb.git

This weekend, in Ghent Belgium, the annual Rockbox developers conference “devcon” is taking place. Unfortunately I’m not there myself this year, but I can get a little sense of the atmosphere by following the live stream. Click the image to get to it. Do note that the stream will only be alive during this weekend June 5-6 2010.

Here’s the team that was present at Devcon, picture from petur’s comment:

At last, the first meeting with our recently started foss-sthlm effort took place. The amount of attention and attendance we achieved by far surpassed our wildest assumptions, and around 130-140 persons interested in open source showed up (we don’t know the exact number). The facilities in Kista where we held the event, were graciously let to our use by Stockholm’s University (DSV) and they were very good. MSC and Nohup were our two sponsors who donated great sub sandwiches and drinks to all of us. Thank you!

I’m glad we manage to offer this event completely free of charge to the attendees, and hey we had quality talkers speaking up on really interesting subject that I think the audience appreciated on the subjects of PostgreSQL, Upstart, Open Source Sweden, Rockbox and Debian packaging.

I did a 20 minute talk about curl – in Swedish. The slides are available (they are thus in Swedish too), see below, and hopefully there will soon be video available online with my presentation.

I also hope that we will gather all the slides at one single point to offer on the foss-sthlm web site, so check that out later on if you want the lot!

And here are Björn’s slides:

We rarely discuss what the future of Rockbox looks like, as it rarely actually matters. We work on whatever we think is fun and all things are fine.

Now, I’d like to do something different and actually lift my nose and stare towards the horizon. What’s in the future for Rockbox?

Dedicated mp3 players vanish

I claim that the current world of portable mp3 and music players is dying. Within just a few years, there will only be a few low-end players left being manufactured and most portable music will be done on much more capable (CPU and OS wise) devices such as the current smartphones, be it Android, Maemo or iPhone based ones.

While maintaining Rockbox to work and prosper on the existing targets is not a bad thing, the end of the line as a stand-alone firmware is in sight. I say the only viable future for Rockbox when the players go very advanced, is not to make Rockbox handle networking etc, it is to make sure that it can run and function as an app on these new devices and to take advantage of their existing network stacks etc.

An app for that?

Rockbox as an app has been a story we’ve told the kids around the campfires for a good while by now and yet we haven’t actually seen it take off in any significant way. I’m now building up my own interest in working on making this happen. In a chat after my Rockbox talk at Fosdem 2010, two other core Rockbox developers (Zagor and gevaerts) seemed to agree to the general view that a Rockbox future involves it running as an app.

Out of the existing systems mentioned above, I’d prefer to start this work focused on Android. It has the widest company backing combined with open source and it’s also the most used open phone OS. I don’t think there’s anything that will prevent us from working on all those platforms as the back-bone should be able to remain the same and portable code we already have and use. Heck, it could then also become more of a regular app for common desktops too.

Challenges

Changing Rockbox to become an application instead of a full operating system and application suite involves a lot of changes. Some of the things we need to solve include:

• We need to make sure we can use the OS’ native threading without any particular performance loss. The simulator shows that there are might be problems with this right in the current code as it runs dog slow on a Nokia n900.
• The full suite of plugins and games and so on doesn’t really fit that well when Rockbox is just an app in itself.
• Different screen sizes. Lots of stuff in Rockbox assume a compile-time fixed screen size, while a good phone app would have to be able to work with whatever size the particular happens to feature. I don’t think we need to care about live resizing (yet).

Update, July 2010: The app part II.