Just recently, it was announced that the guys now have a Rockbox port with working sound on the Mini 2440 device. So it seems this port is already in a quite advanced state with most of the Rockbox functionality in place. The Rockbox Mini2440 page lists USB and SD drivers as notable missing pieces. So there’s still room for you to join in and help out!
Congratulations guys!
Michael “TheSeven” Sparmann is one of the primary magicians behind the recent linux4nano efforts and he has done a lot of the Rockbox port for the iPod Nano 2nd generation.
Some 10 hours or so he posted this neat picture:
… showing off custom code running on an iPod Nano 4th generation. If you want to keep track of his/their work on recent iPods, follow @linux4nano on twitter. I do!
While this is not yet Rockbox on the device, this is a least proof it can be done and this could indeed be seen as the first tiny steps towards a full port! Good job Michael!
Only seven months after my initial post here, Maurus Cuelenaere strikes back with this video of current status for Rockbox on the Onda VX747.
Impressive!
Jorge “casainho” Pinto is known in the Rockbox circles as the main guy behind the “Rockbox Player” project which strives to build their own portable music player to run Rockbox.
They’ve made some progress latetly, and they’ve now run Rockbox far enough to display stuff on their screen:
Click the image for the full photo. Cortesy of Casainho himself. “I hope to take no more than 1 month to finish the port.“
The target is using an Atmel AT91SAM9260 at 200MHz and the screen is a 12bit color 128×128 one.
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)
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!
Back in October 2007 I wrote about the first stumbling attempts to get Rockbox onto the iAudio 7 player, but development really didn’t get up to speed until very recently when Vitja Makarov posted his initial patch for this and now has also followed-up with a shot of his player showing custom code displaying debug code!
Lovely!
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!
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.
With the recently published jailbreak for iPod Touch, combined with the SDL port for iPhone there should be little in the way for running Rockbox on it as an application, pretty much in exctly the same way I mentioned how Rockbox could be made to run on mobile phones.
It seems a suitable place to start this venture is the iphone-dev project page.
While the iPhone and iPod Touch aren’t 100% identical internally, it seems they’re similar enough to make the differences possible to ignore. Also, the fact that what everyone does is build applications that run under the normal Apple-provided OS, there’s no need to know or learn how to poke on the actual hardware so subtle differences in audio chips etc is abstracted away by the operating system even for applications put on the unit this way.
Update nov 2008: With the recent developments on the linuxoniphone blog, it looks like an iPod Touch version of Rockbox is now a lot more likely to be possible. Still, nobody has yet volunteered to start this work and I won’t even say that it is likely that anyone will make an attempt.