daniel.haxx.se

So Google says there could be 18 phones running Android by the end of this year. In Sweden we just days ago got HTC Magic, the first ever Android phone showing up here (tied to a ridiculous operator deal that makes me and lots of my friends not go that route). Then Palm shipped their Palm Pre just days ago, also based on Linux.

This has brought the interesting questions: how is the state of these kernel ports in regards to the mainline Linux tree? They’re both using ARM cores (of course).

The ARM kernel maintainer Russell King himself is not impressed. Apparently Google hasn’t even tried to push their work upstream to the kernel in a long while. The tone in that discussion did make it sound as if they might be starting to work on this again now.

The Palm guys apparently haven’t even yet shown any code at all, but is said to be releasing their code within two weeks to opensource.palm.com.  They have not even tried to push their work upstream, so I figure they’re either not even going to bother or they are facing a rather steep uphill battle in the future.

I’ve previously blogged about the initiative to build an own open hardware platform that can run Rockbox fine, and just today I noticed their new site is up and alive at:

http://lyre.sourceforge.net/

The hardware has changed quite significantly since the last blog entry of mine, and they’re now using a LPC3130 from NXP instead of the Atmel they had before, and I believe they’ve also changed codec/DAC etc. Me knowingly, Rockbox does not yet run on this newly produced board.

I should probably also add that this board is of course still quite far from being portable and there’s no news or info anywhere on how or if you can actually get one of these yourself yet.

This is a follow-up on my “getting the new toy” from a week or so ago. An Eee PC S101.

I didn’t like easypeasy on it. It seems that distro is more or less Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) with a little EEE flavor applied. What’s not to like about it? They seem to think that because this is a netbook, normal UI guidelines no longer apply so therefore they’ve scrapped the ordinary main desktop (and its menu) concept and instead have a new full-screen “app launcher”. That’s not too shabby, but it comes with another idea that I can’t accept: they run all applications in full-screen mode by default. And I couldn’t figure out how to alter that default.

Full-screen might be fine for some apps at some times, but then I’d like to explicitly ask for it instead of having to learn now to “unmaximize” each app (they’ve also removed/altered the window decorations so there are no standard three buttons on the upper right corner of the maximized windows). To top it off, it seemed that the latest easypeasy isn’t built with the latest ubuntu and thus it failed to connect with my 3g modem…

Instead I took the base version of eeebuntu for a spin and that is so much closer to what I want in a linux. It’s ‘base’ so it only comes with the bare minimum. It has no fancy alternative UI but relies on the traditional well-proven and by me liked X11 (gnome) desktop.

I inserted my Sony Ericsson MD400 USB 3g modem that I got from Telenor/Bredbandsbolaget and within a few seconds I was online. It couldn’t have been a much smoother ride.

I know people have expressed opinions that it’s a better idea to use laptops/netbooks with an internal 3g modem so that you don’t have to use any external devices so that it’ll be more slick and all. I think I was of that opinion as well until I got this usb thing in my hand. It’s basically just a tad larger than any ordinary USB memory stick (70 x 28 x 15 mm) so it’s really not much “in the way” or disturbing when inserted in a laptop and it comes with windows drivers on it (as it dual-serves as a usb mass-storage device as well). It makes it a perfect little device to move between different laptops. We have so far three laptops in our household and now I can get any of them onto 3g if I want to.

A little side-note on my eeebuntu install on the SD card: when I ran unetbootin I selected to install the “live/install” version on the hard drive (which of course is a SSD but anyway) to then install it on my SDHC card, but it simply wouldn’t work. I tried three times and every time it froze somewhere in the middle of the install. When I then re-ran unetbootin and made a boot usb stick, and then ran from there instead when I did the install, it worked perfectly…

Proving my point from before that everything wants to be “HD” these days, I read the Zune HD specs that come out recently and in that I found out that it claims to support HD radio. Amusingly enough, it does not claim mp3hd support which probably would’ve made the buzzword bingo crowds go wild. We can always hope for the next model!

So what is HD radio? The site says:

Instead of sending out one analog signal, stations send out a bundled signal – both analog and digital. Because it is digital, textual data such as traffic, stock info and song titles can be sent out, as well.

From what I understand, pretty much the same way RDS is already done.

The technology is not even new. The site lists news items from 2006 and yet I’ve never heard of it before. They claim FM stations get “CD-quality sound” and (as I find pretty funny) AM stations get “FM-quality sound”. What is “CD-quality” in this context I wonder? I find no mention or details on what exact codecs or bitrates etc they use. Wikipedia’s page to the rescue: it says you get approximately 100-150 kbps of a lossy “proprietary iBiquity HDC codec” which claims to be able to provide “CD quality as low as 64 kbit/s”. Somehow I think that sounds a little too good to be true. According to wikipedia HD radio beats DAB in audio quality.

And to top it all of, the FAQ describes what the HD means:

It does not mean either hybrid digital or high definition, it is simply the branding language for this new technology.

Personally I’ll just rather go IP all the way and stream my music/radio/video over that. I think media or content-specific transfer mediums/concepts of this kind are technologies of the past. For this reason, I don’t think DAB+ will have much of a future either.

So finally it went public that this year Rockbox will be mentoring five students to reach their

individual goals and get their projects turned into realities.

The projects are new codecs, one is a new port, one is USB HID work and finally there’s this “make Rockbox an instrument” project.

Personally I’m admin for Rockbox gsoc effort for the third year, and this year I’m also co-mentoring a student (Robert Keevil) in his project to bring Rockbox to the Sansa View.

Let’s make this a great gsoc year!

USB to rs232 converters are just never sold properly advertising what chip’s inside and right now I want to know if this one UART I’m working with perhaps is not playing fine with my existing converter cable.

I have this XScale PXA270 on a board, and it has only one full featured RS232 (FFUART) and I’m about to move things over to the lesser featured BTUART.

A theory is that my current USB converter that is based on a “Prolific PL2303″ doesn’t play nicely on the serial port that isn’t a full RS232.

So I ran off and bought a new cable. I grabbed the only model I found in my local Kjell & Company store – it’s quite different looking than my existing but there’s no hint anywhere on the package or inside of it that says what chipset that empowers it.

A quick drive back home (I’m working from home in this assignment), I plugged it in and I got to see this depressingly familiar dmesg output:

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
usbserial: USB Serial Driver core
usbserial: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
pl2303 2-2.4:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
usb 2-2.4: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
pl2303: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver

So what now? I hate how (my) computers these days don’t have serial ports while the entire embedded world still very much uses them. I think I’ll go searching in my closet to see if I can find an old crap computer with a serial port to try.

Another theory is that the port simply is broken hw-wise on the dev board but that’s harder to check for me right now.

Update: it was (as usual) only my stupidity that prevented this from working. If I switch it over to the correct baudrate the usb converter does fine. But before I found that out, I did find a computer with a serial port and I did see it working on that too…

Ok, I bought myself a Fujifilm FinePix F100fd camera the other day, as it fulfilled my requirements pretty good:

1. It’s compact, noticeably smaller than my previous Sony one.

2. While not a 3″ LCD it features a 2.7″ one, which is a tiny bit larger than my previous’ 2.5″.

3. Image Stabilizer. And in my test shots it seems to make a difference. I’ll admit I haven’t yet played a lot with it on and off, but especially when zooming it seems to do some good.

4. Good low-light images. Yes it does. I’ve so far seen it go down to ISO1600 on auto and while that isn’t the best pictures, using flash is certainly not a good way to achieve great pics either (in general).

5. It accepts SDHC cards. I put a 4GB one in to start with as it costs virtually nothing. My previous camera had 512MB so it’s still 8 times the size. Of course my Sony was 5 megapixels and this does 12 so it will of course produce larger image files.

Possibly I’ll try to make some comparison pictures with my old and my new cameras later on.

There have been fierce activity in the dusty corners of the Rockbox project known as the SanDisk Sansa v2 hackers guild (no not really but I thought it sounded amusing) and this has so far resulted in early code like LCD drivers and NAND drivers on three new upcoming targets: The e200, Fuze and Clip.

There’s still work to do before the celebrations can start for real, but it’s still nice to see good progress.

Now run over and help out!

(picture by Bertrik Sikken)

Maurus Cuelenaere has been very busy lately with his work on porting Rockbox to the Onda VX747 player. This 3″ LCD 4GB/8GB flash player isn’t just touch screen and very ipod touch-looking, it is also equipped with the Ingenic Jz4732 chipset. This is particularly interesting because this baby boasts an XBurst processor, which has a MIPS core clocked at 240 to 400MHz.

In other words: this is the first MIPS-based target Rockbox is being made for. Maurus has custom code running on it, we have rockboxdev.sh adjusted to build a MIPS toolchain and there seem to be a handful of other Chinese PMP players using this chip family so this is a good chance to get a whole bunch of new targets at once. Just join the fun!

Get all the latests news on development for this target and chipset family in this forum thread.

Normally I would link to the company’s official page about a player but this image will take you to a gadget blog site, simply because I cannot find any official site or page for this device!

There have been so many open source initiatives for mobile phones in recent years it’s not even funny (limo, openmoko, Android to name some of the possibly biggest ones). The amount of actual phones on the market using one of them have been very very limited. Apparently there are some Motorola phones running Linux and you can get the Linux-based Nokia N800 tablets but they’re not even phones!

Obviously something has happened in the market though. Perhaps all those initiatives have pushed the big ones into thinking in more open source ways. The most interesting part of today’s news about Nokia buying the entire Symbian is their stated intension to open source it. (they’ve even already chosen the Eclipse Public License for it). It’ll be intereseting to see if there’s any interesting synergies coming up from Nokia’s previous purchase of Trolltech.

Of course, even Symbian has but a small fraction of the entire phone market as they sold 18.5 millions units in Q1 2008. IDC says 291 million phones were sold in the world during Q1 2008, which thus should position Symbian on roughly 6% of the phones that are sold today in the world!

I’m also curious if this will mean that Nokia will use Symbian on a larger scale on their own phones, as currently they seem to use Symbian only on a very small portion of their high-end phones. With Nokia owning the whole thing, they might see a bigger motivation to consolidate their own use of operating systems.