I’ve been trying a new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) image out on my O2 Joggler this week and it is a big improvement over the 9.04 images I’ve been using previously and everything works out of the box without any fiddling.
The image includes all the software normally shipped with the base Ubuntu distribution with the addition of the Chromium browser and Florence on-screen keyboard (see screenshot) which is a huge improvement to the CellWriter keyboard I had been using before. It also includes fixes to the brightness applet so it is usable from the touchscreen and fully working sound through external jack and speakers although this is currently only switchable after a reboot.
Use of the new btrfs filesystem with compression enabled means the install only takes 1.1GB of space as opposed to 2.5GB without compression and it includes EMGD drivers v1.5 and working Compiz and OpenGL however anyone running XBMC should note that it currently doesn’t work with the EMGD driver, nor does the new Ubuntu Unity desktop intended for netbooks.
After over 18 months as a very happy iPhone 3G user I decided it was time to make the switch to Android with the wonderful HTC Desire. As a long term Linux user Android would seem to be my natural place and with the Desire the hardware seems to have pretty much caught up with the Apple world so there was no excuse. Having this great new phone without running the latest and greatest release of Android seemed silly though and not wanting to wait for HTC and O2 to pull their fingers out and release an official update the only answer was to root it and install an unofficial ROM. I was pleasantly surprised how easy this was.
Obviously I take no responsibility if you follow this and anything goes wrong but it worked for me on my Desire with HBOOT 80. Rooting using the new unrevoked3 is a breeze and a Goldcard is NOT required and as long as you are careful to make a Nandroid backup of your original setup before flashing a replacement ROM then you can’t really go wrong.
Note that by doing this you will void any warranty you may have. Requirements: Linux PC (Ubuntu 10.04 in my case) HTC Desire USB Cable Titanium Backup from the Android Market Unrevoked3 from here (16.1 MB) Updated Radio ROM from here (11.3 MB) Froyo Sense ROM from here (134.4 MB) About 30 minutes
I succumbed to temptation and bought another Joggler for playing around with as the first is serving so well as a bedside media player using Rhythmbox for streaming radio and podcasts and the odd bit of iPlayer.
I thought I would update with a few small things I’ve done recently that others might find useful:
Fixing the XBMC Skin When freshly installed from the XBMC PPA there is some graphical corruption of the skin due to packed textures that the Joggler GPU can’t handle. This is fixed in the svn version, I’ve also uploaded a copy of the svn version of the Confluence skin here so you can install it in the PPA version. This also includes the resized backgrounds specifically for Joggler (from here).
To install either ssh into the Joggler or do the following from Terminal on the Joggler itself:
cd /home/joggler/.xbmc/skin/ wget http://zorg.org/6w tar zxvf xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz rm xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz
Then just change the skin to Confluence_stable in Settings->Appearance->Skin
XBMC full screen switch Another issue with XBMC is that the touchscreen doesn’t work in XBMCs fullscreen mode, I’ve seen a fix mentioned here that works by using the openbox window manager but I’ve done it by installing wmctrl and adding a menu item to switch XBMC to full screen once started. Just create a menu item with the command: wmctrl -x -r xbmc.bin.xbmc.bin -b toggle,fullscreen
XBMC with gesture control I’ve uploaded a short video of XBMC running on the O2 Joggler with easystroke providing gesture control which you can see below. This is the first time I’ve used easystroke and I’m pretty impressed, it could be useful with other apps as well I think.
Turning the screen off I also decided to turn the screensaver off altogether and have added a menu item and desktop icon to switch the screen and backlight off with xset when desired. To do this install the xutils package and add and menu item/launcher for: xset dpms force off To turn the screen back on just touch it. This just works better for me for the way I’ve been using it, of course YMMV.
GMail iPad interface I also tried the GMail iPad interface in Chrome, click the image on the left for a full size screenshot. You can do this by spoofing the iPad user agent string so that Google thinks the Joggler is an iPad. Just add the following to the command to start Chrome: –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10“
so it reads: /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10” %U
Whilst it looks great, scrolling doesn’t work so it’s not particularly useful unfortunately. Would be nice if this could be fixed somehow.
O2 have got the Joggler on offer at £50 again until the end of May so if you missed out last time now is your chance. This is a cracking deal for a nice hackable bit of hardware, I’m very tempted to get another.
See my previous post on the Joggler for more info. Things have moved on a bit since then too and most of the niggles with running Ubuntu have been sorted. I’m actually using a different Ubuntu image now which works “out of the box”.
Android is also running on the Joggler but isn’t really usable yet do a lack of graphics drivers but it’s only a matter of time before that is sorted.
When the window control buttons were moved to the left of the window in Ubuntu 10.04 there were a lot of complaints, Mark Shuttleworth would only say that the move was necessary to free the space on the right for something else; Well here is that something else: Window Indicators, or Windicators. “Windicators are indicators displayed in the window title bar that behave just like the indicators in the panel: they have an icon which shows state, and clicking on the icon brings up a menu.”
Part of the idea is to allow the status bar to be removed from most applications, instead using a Google Chrome like status overlay for transitory messages and moving things like Online/Offline status, progress indicators and so on to the new windicator panel. The windicator panel could also allow for things like application specific volume controls, something which is currently buried in the sound preferences.
This sounds like an excellent idea to me with lots of potential for future development. Hopefully it will placate some of those moaning about the button position too!
I’ve been running the betas of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release for a few weeks now and it has been rock solid so it looks like the final release will be on target on or around the 29th April.
Visually, Ubuntu has never looked so good, the new ambience and radiance themes are a huge improvement over the old default brown and orange look, I’m using the dark ambience theme and it looks great out of the box.
Under the hood things are improved too, as well as all the usual updates to the latest versions of most packages Lucid also has a much faster boot time which will be great for laptops and the like and comes with Gnome 2.30 which has a lot of useful updates including a handy split view mode for the Nautilus file manager. There is also a new panel notification system and a new “Me Menu” to control instant messaging and social networking status. One big feature that is getting a lot of attention is the addition of libimobiledevice to provide easy interfacing with the iPhone and iPod devices. Watch the video here for a demonstration of what is possible with this and a few other tools. The most surprising thing about this to my mind is that it doesn’t require the iPhone/iPod to be jailbroken, an impressive feat and a most welcome update.
Control buttons on Ubuntu 10.04
One somewhat controversial change has been the decision to move the window control buttons to the left hand side, the reason for this has been said to free up the space on the right for “something else” in the future, vague as that might be at the moment the reaction from a lot of people seems to have been a bit extreme; I found that I got used to it very quickly and it is only that way in the new themes and can be changed easily enough using gconf if it really bothers you that much. I’ve decided to leave them on the left.
The upgrade from 9.10 went smoothly as usual, I love how the upgrade procedure on Ubuntu is so robust now, I’ve been using Linux for a long time (since 1995) so I can remember when an full distribution upgrade was the over optimistic attempt you made before giving up and doing a fresh install! This system has been continually upgraded from a 8.04 KDE4 Remix installation right through 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and finally 10.04 with all but zero issues along the way.
Lucid is an LTS (Long Term Support) release that will be supported until April 2013 on the desktop and April 2015 for the server edition so this is going to be a good one to upgrade to if you don’t do so regularly.
I grabbed one of the O2 Jogglers last week while they were on special offer at £49.99. The Joggler is a rebranded version of the OpenPeak OpenFrame and is touted by O2 as a “replacement for your fridge door” it is intended to be a sort of home messaging hub with calendar, weather, news headlines, streaming radio, photo viewer, music player and 50 free text message per month. Physically it looks like a fairly standard 7″ digital photo frame but underneath it hides a lot more. Powered by a 1.3GHz Z520 Atom CPU and with 512Mb RAM, 1Gb storage, WiFi and wired ethernet, 800×480 capacitive touch screen, audio out and USB it has a lot more potential than either the default O2 or OpenPeak software offers.
With the possibilities such hardware offers O2 really are doing themselves a disservice by crippling it with the rubbish default software, it’s no wonder it got such rotten reviews when launched last year at £149.99. Fortunately it is very hackable. It’s a doddle to enable telnet so that you can install extra apps using the default OS. Someone has even made a script called “Pimp My Joggler” to automatically install many of the OpenPeak apps, streaming of BBC TV channels, games and more, although it does install a lot of rubbish so you might want to stick to doing it manually.
As it uses an EFI bootloader booting other operating systems on it is also relatively straightforward and due to the amount of people who have got one of these in their hands since the £49.99 offer the hacking community around it has really taken off in the last couple of weeks. There are people working on various alternate OS options including Linux, Android, MER and MeeGo.
Ubuntu Netbook Edition on the O2 Joggler
I’ve put the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Edition on mine using this image which has support for the touchscreen, WiFi and sound (with a couple of tweaks required to get the sound working). It’s just a case of writing the image to a suitably sized USB device (I used an 8Gb SDHC card in a USB adapter) and turning the Joggler on with it inserted in the USB socket, it will then boot from the USB device leaving the default OS untouched. The Joggler only has the one USB socket so a hub will be required to connect a mouse and keyboard.
Initially I had to log in at the console (login: joggler, password: joggler) and type startx to get X running but strangely once I had fixed the sound it automatically boots straight to the Ubuntu NE desktop, not sure why that would be the case but that is all that was changed.
To fix the sound you need to rename the file /lib/modules/2.6.31.6/kernel/drivers/acpi/processor.ko (eg. to processor.ko.old) and comment out the last line of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add options snd-hda-intel model=basic to the bottom of the file. Reboot and sound should work.
In the last post I described how you can use XBMC Live on the Acer Revo but as well as that works it seemed a waste to restrict the Revo to just XBMC so I’ve since installed the 64 bit version of Xubuntu instead and run XBMC on top of that.
I chose Xubuntu as it is a light weight version of Ubuntu using the XFCE window manager instead of the Gnome desktop environment so has the advantage of having all the Ubuntu repositories available without the overhead of running Gnome or KDE (in the case of Kubuntu).
I installed the 64-bit version of Xubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) available here.
As with XBMC Live I used unetbootin to create a bootable image on a USB flash drive (actually an SD card in this case). Once this is done insert the flash drive or SD card into the Revo and turn it on, pressing F12 during boot and selecting the USB drive or SD as the boot device.
I installed it into the unpartitioned space on the Revo drive leaving the factory Linpus install in place. Linpus is added as an option to the Grub boot menu allowing you to choose between it and your new Xubuntu install should you need to (I can’t see why you would).
Once you have installed Xubuntu and booted into it you will see a popup within a few minutes prompting you to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers which you will need to use the Revo’s ION GPU for HD playback (you will also need to change the “Render Method” to VDPAU in the XBMC settings later on as with the Live setup).
Earlier this week I bought an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 to replace my original Xbox based XBMC system which has provided sterling service for the last 7 years.
I’ve been a big fan of the Xbox version of XBMC and its predecessor Xbox Media Player (it was the only reason I bought my Xbox) but it’s getting a bit limited now due to its 733MHz CPU and paltry 64MB RAM.
By contrast the Revo R3610 has a dual core Atom N330 CPU and up to 4GB RAM as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 Ion GPU. As a result XBMC on the Revo is capable of playing full 1080p HD video without problem. It makes a perfect media center; it’s small, low powered and if you have a MCE remote control it will work straight off, just plug the USB receiver in.
I’m currently using the XBMC Live release which is a self contained install built on top of a minimal Ubuntu installation. Installing XBMC Live on the Revo is a breeze:
Use unetbootin to create a bootable image on a USB flash drive
Insert the flash drive in the Revo and turn it on, pressing F12 during boot and selecting the USB drive as the boot device
At the menu you can select to run straight from the USB drive (option 1) or you can select “Install XBMCLive to disk”
Once that is done just reboot and it will boot straight into XBMC
You will then want to go into the settings and change the “Render Method” in the video section to VDPAU. This allows XBMC to use the Revo’s NVIDIA Ion GPU for video processing. If you are using HDMI for your audio output you will also need to go to the audio section and change the output to Custom and enter plug:hdmi
It makes a fantastic media center and the Revo R3610 with dual core Atom N330 CPU, 2GB RAM and 250GB HD is currently on offer for £199 at ebuyer which is a great deal.
Last week YouTube and Vimeo introduced experimental support for HTML5 video but their choice of video codec, H.264, has caused a bit of a stir. One of the aims of HTML5 is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based technologies such as Flash through the use of the new video tag for embedding video in web pages. The problem with using H.264 for these videos is that it is patented in many countries and its use in a product (eg. a browser) requires a licence from the MPEG-LA. So is it really any better than Flash, Quicktime, Real Video and all the other proprietary standards we’ve had to suffer over the years?
It’s not as if there aren’t free, open source alternatives available, the Ogg Theora codec for instance was actually recommended in earlier drafts of the HTML5 specification.
Whilst H.264 licensing isn’t a problem for Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. it’s a different issue for free and open source software, not just from a cost perspective, but also from a philosophical one. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of engineering explained why Firefox won’t be supporting H.264 video for this reason:
“there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off.”
Granted, these are only experimental options so far, but YouTube in particular, has a huge influence here due to its ubiquitousness; how many people would be happy with a browser that won’t work with YouTube? Admittedly, Flash support isn’t going to go away for a long time yet but if H.264 gets entrenched as the default HTML5 video standard early on by such an influential content provider then the situation is unlikely to change.
In large the web is built on open technologies and HTML5 video has the potential to open up one of the few areas where proprietary technology has a hold. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall at the last hurdle.
@gazza_d Heavily tweaked over years but X10 stuff & lot of the web interface is still based on Misterhouse. Temp graphs are all emoncms now.about 2 hours agoin reply to gazza_d
I’ve been trying a new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) image out on my O2 Joggler this week and it is a big improvement over the 9.04 images I’ve been using previously and everything works out of the box without any fiddling.
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