There has been some talk about folks implementing third-party programs on the Empeg, but requiring the shell prompt to activate them. For example, running Tetris.

Would it be possible to write a modified kernel which allowed limited choices at boot-up time? Perhaps with a graphic to display the choices? I know nothing about the way the kernel works and I don't know whether or not it can even choose what to launch. But at the very least, could it allow something like choosing whether or not to run the volume compression kernel?

The graphic could look like this or something:



Is this even possible at all using the current open-source kernel code?

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Tony Fabris

It should be possible without even touching the kernel code. The player is run from init, so a modified init could be created that allowed the user to make a selection before launching the player or another app. This requires knowledge of how to recognize when the user has pressed a button. I am not sure if anyone has figured out/documented how to do this yet.

Hmmm, actually on second thought this would not allow you to load the compression kernel because the kernel is already loaded at this point. That code should really get added to the player rather than the kernel (didn't someone from empeg sort of commit to this in another thread?).

Choosing a kernel to load is actually much trickier. You are getting into bootloader teritory at that point. Rather nasty stuff as I understand it.

-Mike

Woldn't it be enough that some good and knowlegable soul writes an utility that displays, say, a content of a short file on a screen (one could use text and some primitive character graphic), listens for buttons/remote and returns the code via status and/or stdout. Then we could enable 'Quit' on the player and modify shell's profile to invoke a script that would use this utility for user interaction?

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

You could enable/disable the voladj stuff with an ioctl though from userspace.

We've got double-booting kernels on the empeg, so you ca netboot and load a new kernel over nfs then reboot into it - done for another product though :)

Hugo

Ah, cool. This thread is sparking some interest and discussion.

Hmmm, actually on second thought this would not allow you to load the compression kernel because the kernel is already loaded at this point.

Right. My idea was that this code and the Voladj code could be part of the same kernel. I figured that, if the "choice" was in the kernel, then it could just remember a global variable such as bDoVolAdj. The voladj code could be written so that it didn't do anything if bDoVolAdj==FALSE. As far as launching an external program like Tetris, I don't know how that could be handled under the hood.

That code should really get added to the player rather than the kernel (didn't someone from empeg sort of commit to this in another thread?).

Right, that's true, but that is (as I understand it) waiting on Empeg to release a plug-in architecture for the player software. So until that architecture is available, I think something like this would be a cool way to choose that sort of thing.

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Tony Fabris

You mean something like this?

This is just a rough cut. It takes up to four lines from stdin and displays it. I'm using an 8x8 font here so the display is 16x4. Lines over 16 characters wrap onto the next line.

Enjoy and check back often for updates.

Cheers,

Rex.

Exactly! I knew we have resourcefull people here... Now, we need something to listen for button presses, and we are all set up for user interaction.

Thanks, Rexkp! (BTW, you seem to be a man of few words. I don't recall seeing your posts a lot :)

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Now, we need something to listen for button presses, and we are all set up for user interaction.

That's comming. Thanks to the code posted by others here that will be simple.

(BTW, you seem to be a man of few words. I don't recall seeing your posts a lot :)


Well, I only received my empeg a week ago! Been in lurk mode for a while though.

Cheers,

Rex.

That's comming. Thanks to the code posted by others here that will be simple.

In the meantime I am using Perl. Installation was trivial, once I actually took a look into Debian tarball (of course, I downloaded the whole damn Perl distribution before checking whether it is perhaps already there - it was). It was just a matter of symlinking few libraries. This is becoming fun!

Thanks for disp!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Well this really was easy. I have updated the disp binary here and added picker.

picker allows up to 4 options to be picked using the four buttons on the left of the Mk II. (Not sure how this will behave on the Mk I.)

A sample script is up there too.

Cheers,

Rex.