Tag Archives: 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

Blogging, cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Vacation days are slow days

I just wanted to drop a note saying that the biggest explanation for the silence and slowness of my blog the last couple of weeks have been my ongoing vacation, which is still going on for another two weeks.

Of course things are happening still, but due to my lack of computer time right now I tend to prioritize actually working with those things rather than posting here writing about the stuff I do/read/fix.

The Rockbox Steering Board vote is over, results will be published soon (spoiler: I’m voted in as one of the members). There’s a curl release coming up for August and we still have a few outstanding issues to fix. More on these topics later!

Electronics, Rockbox

Rockbox on the Onda VX747

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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.

Onda VX747

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!

Open Source

“Nordic” Projects?

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It did struck me why the idea of handing the Nordic Free Software Award to a project feels like a bad idea: Free Software projects really aren’t geographical in general.

People tend to live at a fixed location for a specific time and thus you can say that N is living in a Nordic country or not.

Free Software projects however, are not even allowed to exclude people from other places and even projects that may origin at once place or even have its largest user-base in a particular geographical spot.

Last year’s Nordic Free Software Award was handed to Skolelinux since I believe the project origins in Norway (a nordic country) and some of the leading persons in the project are Norwegian. But is that then a nordic project? I don’t want to claim that it isn’t because I honestly don’t know, but their web site certainly says nothing about it being restricted or limited to nordic countries in any significant way. If it does, I couldn’t find it.

I am the primary person and maintainer behind curl but I wouldn’t dream of calling it a “nordic” project. The trio who started Rockbox are all Swedish but calling it a nordic project would just make me laugh.

Isn’t it so, that if you can come up with a “Nordic” Free Software project that currently only lives and strives within one or more Nordic countries without spreading itself over the world, isn’t that then more likely to be a proof of a failure of said project than anything else?