Mindstab.net

• New server location seems to be working out well enough.
• Well, I’m back in school and taking Calculus 3, Linear Algebra, and Unix Tools and Scripting. Also, I now am working as a lab aid. So I am busy. On the plus side this is the first job I’ve gotten because I’ve taken some post secondary school so I’m kind of pleased that it’s starting to pay off a bit already.
• Over the course of my 3 week vacation I watched most of “The Dead Zone” tv series and read Issac Asimov’s Foundation series (5 books).
• Even with my busy schedule I plan to find time to poke the server for some updates and some how find time to learn some lisp. We shall see.
• With Gnome 2.16 coming out and Gentoo stabilizing GCC 4.1 and Glib 2.4 I also have some updates to look at for my boxes so that I’m sure will take time too. I might just keyword them on my server as it’s probably not worth my time there and upgrade them on my desktop and laptop only.
• Haven’t much touched my GP2X partly because even with the audio port attached it has never accepted an audio plug quite fully. And I don’t have time for games. It’s starting to feel like financial dead weight. I think I just want an Ogg playing mp3 player with decent audio. Anyone want a GP2X?

Well I’ve been out of school for less than a day and I’ve already gotten my GP2X back from Robert. Went over yesterday and he soldered the audio jack back on and all was good. Thanks!

So Today I upgraded to the 2.0 firmware. I have some advice. Do it SLOWLY. In stages. The whole flashing system in total is pretty resilient but in parts pretty fallible.

Start by getting the uboot 2.0 upgrade and put it by itself on a FAT SD card and plop that into your GP2X. Ideally it should then upgrade your bootloader and when you reboot it will say version 2.0 on the first black screen. If it doesn’t, try holding START SELECT down when turning the GP2X on.

Once you have the next bootloader remove those files from the SD card and put the gp2kernel.img from the 2.0 firmware update on the card by itself. Turn on the GP2X while holding START SELECT and it should take you too an updating firmware screen. Then it should go to the green boot screen now saying 2.0 firmware. No you are making progress.

Finally, remove the kernel from the SD card and put the rest of the files from the update onto the SD card and turn the GP2X on again while holding START SELECT. Now it should go through a series of update screens. Give it some time. When that is done you will finally be all the way at the new 2.0 firmware.

It’s cool stuff. Check out the extended utility menus about USB host mode and USB networking. They’ve put some cool stuff on there.

And if at any point your update fails, just try that stage again. As long as you get the black boot loader screen you can try again. Just do the kernel again and when you get the green screen just do the filesystem again (all the other files). It’s a very resilient process because it’s also highly accident prone ;).

And now to play with my new again toy.

[Reference: Howto Unbrick 'most' bricked GP2X's]

I believe I’ve been a gimp to outside observers the last few days. Because somewhere in there, sadly, a toggle in my GP2X broke and the speakers stayed on when the headphone jack was in. I discovered this today and was greatly dismayed. After hitting up the forums I found I wasn’t alone and this was a know problem with some units. Not greatest of news, but then I found this thread which part way down has a speaker toggle program. You can shut them off.

I’m pleased enough with this. I’d rather not have the glitch, but I see GPH as being in a tough position. It’s a small market and I’d rather they were successful and continued on and made more devices. So I don’t want lots of people including myself costing them the price of another unit for such a minor minor problem. It’s lame. So I can live with this assuming they learn from this and do a bit more testing with the next generation of units. Besides, I just put the toggle script right by my daemon music player script. Not so bad. And now I again have music, tons of text reading (including pdfs) and Quake. It’s good.

Well, school has started and is keeping me busy, however not busy enough it seems :P. But I have massive breaks each day so I’ve been pondering how to network my gear better and have a more comfortable environment at school. There’s shit wi-fi at school. It’s only in the library and only for like port 80 and 433. I really need port 22 to be productive. So I usually use the lab computers rather than bring my laptop. Squirrel Mail has been pretty decent for keeping on top of my mail, but my RSS feeds have been getting out of control since I could only check them from my computer. So I decided I needed an online way to read them, so I launched planet.mindstab.net so I could keep track of everything from anywhere.

I’ve been playing around with webcams lately, and discovered that even in the $100+ range the quality is still generally poor. So I don’t have a new webcam. But I did pick up a 1GB Kingston USB disk (tiny in physical size) for $70 once I get my mail in rebate. I’ll be drop a bunch of software on their and customized to my likings. Hopefully that will help. Also, once the GP2X starts functioning properly with USB 2.0, I can use it as an SD card read and portable Unix environment. So that’s all looking pretty good.

Also, when I got my GP2X I was feeding it AA batteries. I was worried. But it seems it was the battery quality. I’m sure it’s still pretty aggressive on power, but the NoName Brand batteries were crap and needed changing a few times a day. I got some Energizer 2500mAh NiMH batteries for Christmas and they’ve been lasting much longer.

So an enterprising lad by the name of gfoot on the GP2X forums has backported the linux 2.6 USB gadget serial module to the 2.4 kernel and compiled it for the GP2X [Thread, module].

Once you get the module, a fellow named luteijn wrote a script to set up a one shot bash prompt on the GP2X waiting for a connection (the script must be run each time you want to connect, because disconnecting kills the bash session) while the menu runs [bash script]. Then just drop the script and module on an SD card in the same directory and run the script from the utility menu of the GP2X. It will then be ready to receive connections. Once the g_serial module is loaded and working you can’t use the GP2X’s USB storage device emulation at the same time, so I came up with unbash.gpu:

unbash.gpu

#!/bin/sh

rmmod g_serial
cd /usr/gp2x
exec ./gp2xmenu > /dev/null 2>&1

On the client side, you need to have the usbserial and cdc_acm modules loaded (both found in the USB section of the Kernel menu). If you get this right, /dev/ttyACM0 should show up, which is your tty -> USB -> GP2X device.

Once that’s done right you have to setup minicom. Run minicom -s so that you go into setup before minicom initializes. Go into ‘Serial port setup’ and change the Serial Device to /dev/ttyACM0, and hit F to turn off Hardware Flow Control. Exit that menu and go into ‘Modem and dialing’, and hit A and clear the entire ‘Init String’ (it’s useless for this purpose). Then you should be good to go. Save the setup for easy reuse and then exit the menu and you should be greeted by a bash# prompt on your GP2X.

Screen has subsequently been ported to the GP2X. You’ll probably want to add the ‘-m’ switch when running minicom, as this makes it use ALT-key instead of CTRL-A-key for accessing it’s menus. Using ‘-m’ it won’t overlap with screen’s CTRL-A commands.

Obligatory screenshot

Well, I picked up a Creative Webcam Notebook. Works with the spca5xx driver. But since it’s usb 1.1 it’s still grainy video, even if high res. We’ll see.

Using Rob Brown’s GP2X Firmware Updater I finally got my GP2X’s firmware updated, now to 1.1.0. Awesome. So I’m really pleased about that and looking to see some improved battery life.

Now I’m off for a weeks vacation at a cabin with friends on an island. I’ll prolly check in via war driving, but don’t expect much. Toodles

Well, now that school’s over I’m getting some tasks of my task list. The first was to finish writing a user quota monitoring and “billing” system. I finally finished that after a few months of staggered work. Now I’ve revamped and cleaned up the Mindstab wordpress skin. I think the layout is a bit cleaner, and it works well so far in IE as well. The front page is done, but the comments page needs some work. Then some slight tag restructuring and hopefully I’ll be content with this for a bit and I can more on to my next project.

As for my GP2X, I now have Quake1, Starcon 2 (UQM), NES (mario 1-3), SNES (Killer Instinct, Kirby, Chrono Trigger), and Sega (Sonic) all working on it. Some of them are unoptimized demos so far, but they all work. This device is still pre-official release and it rocks. I love it to bits.

Well I haven’t had too much time to play with it what with exams, but I’ve had some. The only problem so far is the bootloader wont recognize my SD cards for firmware updates but I’m sure someone will write a program to update that once the gp2x is running soon since hte problem seems rather prevelant. Other than that it’s a hoot. I’ve been reading txts on it and listening ot music. Playing around. The latest and greatest app for it is STerm, an actualy terminal running on the gp2x. Using fbgrab I took a screenshot:

My GP2X finally arrived today. It kicks ass. The first thing I did was drop Quake1 on it and it runs. They big thing to remember now is that the is a first edition unit and the official launch isn’t until January. So yes, it does crash and lock up do to beta-ness of OS and the alpha-ness of many programs being ported. But still, way cool. SD cards rock. I put a ton of music, quake1 and quake2 (not working quite yet for me), some skins, text, and other misc stuff all on one disk. I’ve already upgraded to the newest firmware. This toy is going to be so much fun. For music, it’s new my player. Beats the pants off my old Muvo which couldn’t handle ogg, was only 128mb, and had no shuffle (my favourite feature). Video wise, the codec support for videos is currently weak but I expect that to improve within a few months. Hell, everything should. There’s a hard core and dedicated team of enthusiasts out there working on this thing. It’s going to own. Probably more babling later when I’m not tired.

Well, I preordered my GP2X, so I’m excited. Signed up on the forum. Am busy with school and work. Miniscule coding has been done.