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.
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.
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.
Expanding my bread machine horizons with the aid of this great book I was given. Have got chilli bread on the go. http://t.co/rJNDg0qWabout 14 hours ago
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.
Most Popular