Category Archives: Rockbox

http://www.rockbox.org/ is a portable music player software/firmware

Development, Rockbox, Technology

So THAT is the point of releases!

In the Rockbox project we’ve been using a rather sophisticated build system for many years that provide updated binary packages to the public after every single commit. We also provide daily built zips, manuals, fonts and other extras directly off the subversion server fully automatic every day.

I used to be in the camp that thought that this is a very good system to the extent that it makes ordinary version-numbered releases somewhat unnecessary since everyone can easily get recent downloads whenever they want anyway. We also had a general problem getting a release done.

But as you all know by now, we shipped Rockbox 3.0 the other day. And man did it hit the news!

lifehacker.com, gizmodo.com, engadget.com, slashdot.org, golum.de, boingboing.net, reddit.com and others helped us really put our web server to a crawl. The 4 days following the release, we got roughly 160,000 more visits on our site than usual, 5 times the normal amount (200,000 visits compared to the “normal” 40,000).

Of course, as a pure open source project with no company or money involved anywhere, we don’t exactly need new users but we of course want more developers and hopefully we do reach out to a few new potential contributors when we become known to a larger amount of people.

So I’m now officially convinced: doing this release was a good thing!

Rockbox, Technology

gdgt #2 said Rockbox

Ryan and Peter from Engadget and Gizmodo fame are now making a new site and podcast series. The latter seem to have climbed the “charts” very rapidly and it is a top podcast in the tech sector on itunes apparently.

Anyway, in the second episode (about 20 minutes into it) they did a very brief and non-explanatory reference to Rockbox about wanting to install it on a SanDisk Sansa e280. Anyway, they didn’t say much about it at all but I simply enjoyed having it reached that level of no-need-to-explain-what-it-is-when-mentioned.

Rockbox, Security, Web

A bad move. A really bad move.

So I wrote this little perl script to perform a lot of repeated binary Rockbox builds. It builds something like 35 builds and zips them up and gives them proper names in a dedicated output directory. Perfect to do things such as release builds.

Then I wrote a similar one to build manuals and offer them too. I then made the results available on the Rockbox 3.0RC (release candidate) page of mine.

Cool, me thinks, and since I’ll be away now for a week starting Wednesday I think I should make the scripts available in case someone else wants to play with them and possibly make a release while I’m gone.

I did

mv buildall.pl webdirectory/buildall.pl.txt

… thinking that I don’t want it to try to execute as a perl script on the server so I rename it to a .txt extension. But did this work? No. Did it cause total havoc? Yes.

First, Apache apparently still thinks these files are perl scripts (== cgi scripts) on my server, even if they got an additional extension. I really really didn’t expect this.

Then, my scripts are doing a command chain similar to “mkdir dir; cd dir; rm -rf *”. It works great when invoked in the correct directory. It works less fine when the web server invokes this because someone clicked on the file I just made available to the world.

Recursive deletion of all files the web server user was allowed to erase.

Did I immediately suspect foul play and evil doings by outsiders? Yes. Did it take quite a while to restore the damages from backups? Yes. Did it feel painful to realize that I myself was to blame for this entire incident and not at all any outside or evil perpetrator? Yes yes yes.

But honestly, in the end I felt good that it wasn’t a security hole somewhere that caused it since I hate spending all that time to track it down and fix it. And thanks to a very fine backup system, I had most of the site and things back up and running after roughly one hour off-line time.

Rockbox

Rockbox

DFU mode on 2nd gen Nanos

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Some clever hackers in the Rockbox community wrote up a tool to access the Meizu players’ DFU mode (while running Linux – which I already mentioned), and using this we can upload and run code on several Meizu targets. The code is put and executed in SDRAM only. It makes it a perfect way to test new code on it.

The Meizu players have their SoC in common with Apple’s Nano 2nd gen and Shuffle 2nd gen.

There are indications that the Nanos have such a DFU mode as well, even though we don’t currently know of any way to trigger it by will. Possibly shorting the NAND chip or destroying the firmware or similar might do it.

If you have such a broken Nano or Shuffle, please get in touch and we can do some poking around!

Obviously, there’s a DFU mode on the iphone and iPod touch that can be triggered:

“Your phone must be off, but attached via USB to the PC. Then you hold the power and “home” buttons for 10 seconds. At the ten second mark, you release the power button, but keep the “home” button pressed for another 10 seconds. At the end of that process, the phone enters DFU mode (the only way to tell is windows will tell you a USB DFU device has connected)” (thanks to GodEater)

Although I’m convinced our limited DFU experiments will not be a lot of fun on those devices (yet).

It seems iPod Classics can also go into this mode.

For the iPod Nano 2nd gen:

“To access DFU mode, reset the iPod with MENU+SELECT, then press and hold BACK+PLAY. A picture of the dock connector should appear with the Apple support URL; according to lsusb, this is DFU mode…  it seems that you have to first trash the firmware before you can access it.” (thanks to LambdaCalculus37)

Since autumn 2009, Rockbox boots and runs on the iPod Nano 2nd generation!

Rockbox

Good port day

Things happen in bursts. Development goes on and on for long periods without any noticeable big breakthroughs, and then all of a sudden a lot happens at once. And those days are the best days!

Rockbox now works somewhat on the iAudio7, new patch posted today!

Rockbox now almost runs on the Creative Zen Vision:m, but at least the guys can now install the bootloader to load and start without having to rip out the harddrive and put it into a PC first!

We can now install new firmwares on the M6 players when running linux thanks to new tools being developed!

Rockbox

A talk that won’t happen

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I had already talked to the guys about going to FSCONS 2008 and do a talk about Rockbox and reverse engineering when I realized that the very same weekend we’re going to Rome, Italy with my company and if that isn’t enough, the Google summer of code mentor summit is also taking place that weekend in late October so if Italy somehow got canceled I would probably rather go to California… I quite enjoyed FSCONS last year so I’m a bit annoyed about this situation.

Isn’t that just the irony of life? Here I have an entire autumn with nothing much planned and then all of a sudden three events all take place on the same weekend.

I’m still on for another talk in September in Stockholm though but since I haven’t seen any public details about it I’ll refrain from being specific just yet.

Blogging, cURL and libcurl, Rockbox, Technology, Web

Site deadness

When I got to work this morning I immediately noticed that one of the servers that host a lot of services for open source projects I tend to play around with (curl, Rockbox and more), had died. It responded to pings but didn’t allow my usual login via ssh. It also hosts this blog.

I called our sysadmin guy who works next to the server and he reported that the screen mentioned inode problems on an ext3 filesystem on sda1. Powercycling the machine did nothing good but the machine simply didn’t even see the hard drive…

I did change our slave DNS for rockbox.org and made it point to a backup web server in the mean time, just to make people aware of the situation.

Some 12 hours after the discovery of the situation, Linus Nielsen Feltzing had the system back up again and it’s looking more or less identical to how it was yesterday. The backup procedure proved itself to be working flawlessly. Linus inserted a new disk, partitioned similar like the previous one, restored the whole backup, fixed the boot (lilo) and wham (ignoring some minor additional fiddling) the server was again up and running.

Thanks Linus!

Licensing, Rockbox

Rockbox is mainly GPL v2 or later

I just wanted to express this loud and clearly:

At the Rockbox devcon back in June, we discussed this issue and we did deem the Rockbox license to be “GPL v2 or later”, so during this summer we have updated the Rockbox source code headers pretty much all over to reflect this fact. (Previously we had a bit of flux where the exact “v2” or “v2 or later” status wasn’t expressed.)

Of course we have not (and should not) change the headers for files we have imported into the project, and there are still pieces in Rockbox that are plain GPLv2 (without the “or later”) like a few snippets that origin from the Linux kernel.

We also did receive permission from Bernard Leach, the main ipodlinux kernel hacker, to put his code under the “v2 or later” label as well.

The net result is of course that Rockbox is GPLv2 but with the largest parts v2 or later.

Rockbox