In the most recent Lugradio podcast Episode 19 Season 5 at roughly 1h30 into the show, we got to hear a user’s write-in explain to the hosts about the benefits of using Rockbox on your ipods. Although the hosts aren’t very impressed… They also later on mention that they did get “a lot of mail about Rockbox” so obviously it is getting quite known out there.
Back at FSCONS ’07, I asked the guy doing the Openmoko presentation about whether they are going GTK or Qt, as his talk mentioned both and he didn’t really spell it out on what horse they were putting their money on. He then thought it was a really funny question and went on to explain how the Openmoko is like a small computer that can run anything you want. A bit like he was educating us that embedded devices do have CPUs that can run actual software. As if they wouldn’t have a main branch and a main development selecting one of these particular toolkits…
Many moon laps later, I discussed Openmoko with a friend over a few stouts at Snaxx 18, and he explained how he’d got one of the dev boards a long time ago and had kept up and tried a lot of versions of it and that it basically never worked to even make simple phone calls. He gave me the impression that perhaps the project wasn’t really that well run if it after this long still don’t have even the most basic functionality present and running stable.
Therefor I was happy to listen to TWIT 143 about the Dash Express and them telling me about it being based on the Openmoko platform. It felt like solid proof they are moving in the right direction then, so at least parts of the project must be functioning!
Then, to round it up it was with a big grin I read about the recent news that they are abandoning GTK and are now going to use E17 and Qt instead. Not a trace of any “this is like a small computer it can run anything” talk now (although I do understand that the statement was just something from this person and not any public endorsement from the project or so). This very same Ars Technica article says the first Openmoko based phone called Freerunner is going into “mass production stage next month” (that would be June 2008).
Personally, I can still see how making Rockbox run as an application on an Openmoko device would be a very cool thing.
Robert Menes uploaded some photos of an early Rockbox port running on his SanDisk Sansa m240 (v1), and this much thanks to Dave Chapman’s early work. This port still lacks NAND driver and various important things so you still need tcctool to get code onto the target, but at least there’s evidence of progress now!
I counted the Rockbox downloads from build.rockbox.org during April 2008, and while the results weren’t very different from the past results, I thought I’d still show them. This month, 99874 downloads were counted and we had 30 different packages downloaded. Back in January, we still only had 26 versions. The top-5 are identical to the last list.
The most popular newcomer since my last count is the Olympus Mrobe 100 which has more than twice the number of downloads compared to the second newcomer iAudio m3.
The list shows model and number of downloads. The newcomers since the last count are shown bold.
Dave Chapman just told us that he’s managed to upgrade his SanDisk Sansa Clip to run a customized firmware, which proves that we know the file format good enough. His proof of concept simply did a 5 second delay, but now we should be a pretty big step forwards on the way towards getting Rockbox to the Sansa v2 models.
I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:
Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.
Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.
Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!
SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.
SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!
SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…
Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.
I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…
I have one of them mp3 capable mobile phones and I have a 4GB NAND flash inserted in it that is packed with music I like. Yet I never end up using it as a music player.
I see people everywhere use their phones for music and I repeatedly read and hear the soon coming death of the portable music player being predicted not far away by opinion-expressing know-it-allers.
My phone plays mp3 files just fine, but there are several reasons why I don’t use it for that. The primary one being that it gets a lousy battery run-time if I do that, and if I’d run down the battery all the way when listening to music then how would I be able to use the phone for regular voice? With a separate (Rockbox) device I can listen to music until the last drop of power goes out without hampering my communication abilities.
In my particular case, my phone’s lack of a proper standard USB port and it’s lack of anything but “full speed” (and yes full speed is less than high speed and is a lot slower than it sounds) when connecting it using the custom cable to my Linux box are two more reasons. Not to mention that it has this “database-only” approach to the music which I really don’t like – but yeah, I can learn to live with it.
Besides, it’ll be a while longer until I can hack my phone to run Rockbox and thus work the way I want it. Let’s hope Android or OpenMoko or similar efforts actually make it possible one day.
Less is more it is said, and I can certainly subscribe to the reverse: more means less. The two primary open source projects I spend time in have been growing the last years, in source code contributions, but also in amount of users and in amount of contributors. I see the similar effects on myself and on my own role in both Rockbox and curl: I do more and more coordination, planning, admin work, talk (chatting on IRC, responding to mails etc) and “guidance” than actual coding work. My code/non-code work ratio has decreased massively.
This is not complaint, just an observation!
It makes sense to me that early on in a project, and until there’s enough momentum to get the project to more or less drive itself, it is important with a driving core that pushes the project forward. That makes sure every little peace fits together and gets the proper attention to make it a good product and project. As time goes by, more and more people get that knowledge, that ability and the amount of people that drive the project forward increases.
So being an “elderly” in both these projects, I’m more of an advisor, talker, tinker, admin, than a lead programmer now. This is at least most notable in Rockbox, since we have 80 committers now and I think at least 50 of them are active.
I probably spend roughly the same amount of time: somewhere around 2-3 hours/day on my open source projects.
Of course, in my particular case exactly now, I’ve also just recently ramped up my working hours and find myself trying to get accustomed to this life with full-time work, a two-kids-and-wife family and several time-consuming spare time projects. It takes a great deal of juggling and less sleeping.
Nothing is forever so I’m certain my situation will change over time. I’m determined to continue hacking in both projects. And my juggling skills will improve…
I find it noteworthy that the FSF runs a campaign they call playogg in which they detail the importance and stuff why people should avoid non-free formats and instead use Ogg Vorbis in preference to mp3 for example.
Yet, they document a number of alternatives for Mac users, for Windows users etc on the front page, but there’s not a single word of advice for people with portable music players. Then again, it is very hard for people to find free software alternatives to their portable music players and FSF being so very anti-closed source this makes me wonder why there’s no mention of Rockbox, ipodlinux or even sansalinux to be found?
The only place with this info that I could find when following links from their site, was about three clicks away on xiph.org’s PortablePlayers wiki page but the majority of the stuff mentioned there is non-free…!
It was just publicly announced that Rockbox will get 4 slots from Google for this year’s Summer of Code: