http://www.rockbox.org/ is a portable music player software/firmware
It was just announced in an email sent to me:
Congratulations!
Your organization “Rockbox” has been accepted in to the Google Summer of Code(tm) 2008.
So let’s get more possible mentors to sign up and let’s get talking with potential students and what they can work on this summer!
Update: the full list of projects is now up at code.google.com/soc/2008/
On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.
The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.
I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.
(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)
This player’s been out for quite some time and most certainly won’t be found anywhere to be bought as new. Still, Jens Arnold’s been working hard on this port lately and just minutes ago he mentioned that he got sound working on it – and the build table subsequently has all three kinds of the M3 build added to it.
The M3 is roughly an M5 but without any LCD on the main unit, there’s only that one on the LCD! And of course the M5 was almost an X5 but with a greyscale LCD… So it is another one of them Coldfire 5249 based targets. The LCD on the remote is 128×96 2bit greyscale,
The M3 comes with 20 or 40GB harddisk and there’s an M3L around with a larger capacity battery
How many Rockbox ports are there now? It’s hard to tell as it really depends on what level of maturity and how much functionality you require before you count it as an actual port, but the configure script in our source tree has 38 different ones mentioned. I believe some of them are not more than embryos, but there are also other initial efforts not yet added to this script.
In the eternal chase for new targets to port Rockbox to, the turn seems to have come to the tiny Meizu M6 player.
This 55 gram thing is slightly smaller than a credit card (width and height at least) and it boasts a 2.4″ LCD, 4GB flash and is powered by a Samsung SA58700 (ARM940T core and a CalmRISC16 DSP thing). It has an FM tuner and built-in mic for recording as well.
There’s of course the standard Rockbox forum thread,and an HW info page in the Rockbox wiki.
Other targets with the exact same SoC include the irivers E10, clix and S10. But none of those have a Rockbox port yet.
SRF (synskadades riksförbund – the Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired) is a Swedish organization that recently expressed concerns about open source (in Swedish), since as they say “open source in itself is no guarantee for accessibility to disabled persons” (my translation).
The argument came up because Mats Odell, a minister in the Swedish government, expressed a positive attitude towards open source within governments (link in Swedish).
I find it disturbing that these visually impaired guys immediately bounce back and seem to imply and think that open source automatically somehow is less useful, less quality, less fitting or less accessible. But sure, open source is not a guarantee for better accessibility, but then nobody claimed it either and I don’t see how any software can be guaranteed to be better. A very weird statement it was I must say.
One perfect example showing how open source adds accessibility is how Rockbox works. By providing innovative functionality, it makes devices suddenly a whole lot more usable to blind or visually impaired persons. There’s simply no commercial alternatives coming close.
Other fine example on how open source makes software more accessible than any closed-source competitor, is in how translations can be done even to very small languages spoken by economically not so wealthy population groups. Like how closed-source programs fail to deliver software translated to the 11 official languages of South Africa and a lot of other ones.
To round off, the orca project makes openoffice, Firefox, gnome apps and Java-based apps accessible. I’m not saying I know all about being visually impaired and how they use open source, but I do know that open source is accessible to a far extent at some places and at others there’s room left for improvement. But open source gives everyone the ability to join in and make it happen.
For some reason I haven’t previously properly pushed this fact here:
The Rockbox port for the Olympus M:Robe 100 is soon about to enter the fine room of all the other existing Rockbox ports. It seems most stuff is working in this port now, and with bootloader and daily zips on the download mirrors there’s only a few minor things left before it’ll go in among the other zips on the build page!
The mrobe100 is a mi4-using PortalPlayer-based (PP5020) target with a monochrome LCD. Here’s the proper forum thread.
Most of the magic stuff done on this port seems to have been pulled off by Mark Arigo with Robert Kukla doing a fair share as well. Thanks guys!
To get good results from Google’s Summer of Code, we need a fair amount of volunteering mentors and we need a good set of interesting projects to make students get attracted.
If your interest is in the Rockbox project, add your project ideas or add yourself as mentor on this wiki page.
If your interest is in the cURL project, read this page about the existing ideas and provide new ones or submit yourself as mentor on the mailing list!
Organizations can apply for becoming part of this starting tomorrow, March 3 2008.
As I was involved in gsoc 2007 within the Rockbox project, I ventilated the idea on the libcurl mailing list just yesterday that perhaps this is a good year for the cURL project to apply to become a mentoring organization to be able to host students doing gsoc work?
If so, this is no point unless we can at least present a bunch of interesting projects to lure students to us to have them work to improve (lib)curl and do stuff we otherwise might have a hard time to get done.
What things would you like to see that you consider would be a good project for a student to work on during the summer 2008?
New protocols? Fixing the last remaining blocking calls within libcurl? Fixing up/replacing language bindings? It’s not strictly a requirement that we come up with the best ideas since students apply with their own suggestion anyway, but we can provide good suggestions and ideas that will make students attracted to us and make them select to work for our project – should we be selected as a mentor organization.
Yes, as I hinted earlier Google is indeed going to do their very much appreciated program once again this year. Google’s summer of code accepts mentoring organizations to apply starting March 3rd 2008.
Now let’s get our imaginations and get some even better project ideas added to our gsoc 2008 wiki page!
There is reason to suspect that there’s an upcoming announcement from Google about their Summer of Code 2008, so for the Rockbox project it might be just about time to start thinking about what particular projects we’d like to see done this time!
Of course it is also time to look back on how we performed last year and to consider what we should improve to make sure we do it better this time (should we be accepted again). After all, we got 4 projects assigned, two are now in SVN, one was a complete failure and one was half-done.