Hey All,
I got the thinkin about developing for the empeg. The empeg developers spend tons of time developing apps for the empeg. Now, what would my measily little app do that someone wouldn't have already thought of. These empegs are geared up to play music. Once I put an app on the empeg, how am I supposed to execute the thing? The empeg wants to play my tunes, not run a silly program.

We're working on a plugin architecture: it won't be in the first software release, but it will come. We're trying to get it so other apps can claim part of the screen, and can get the user's focus and at that time get I/O via IrDA and so on.

If you just want to get something running (which doesn't use the screen/audio) then on the developer diskset you just edit /sbin/init to run your code as well as the player...

Hugo

Huh? Are u takin about the BINARY /sbin/init???

Well, I gotta recompile my own init ... somday ;-b

Raphael Wegmann
wegmann@psi.co.at

Since /sbin/init seems to be a nonstandard init (without inittab) is it possible to replace the player
with something like:

#! /bin/sh
/empeg/bin/player.bin $@ &
/mnt/mystuff/whatever


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Raphael Wegmann
raphael@psi.co.at

/sbin/init is a nonstandard init for a good reason: boot time & other bits & pieces. Basically, we needed a small init which would (a) mount the music parititons and (b) run the player. It also (c) restarts the player if it falls over (hopefully unlikely ;) ) and ensures the system is in a safe state after fallover (ie, ensures the disks are read-only in case the player fell over during a music download).

We may make the source to our init available - though almost any custom add would probably have different criteria on what was best to do and so would just run their own init script.

hugo

Anyone who's interested in replacing the original empeg init with a (cut-down rc-files) debian standard init, can go to http://members.psi.co.at/weltreise/empeg.
All you will get (so far) is bash and no player (is coming in the next release) :-b.

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Raphael Wegmann
raphael@psi.co.at

When I start the player from the shell I start from debian init (filesystems are mounted read only),
I get random player hangs with the message:
"../shared/rwlock.h 68 ( 63): We have another writer or readers."
Do you have any explanations for this?

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Raphael Wegmann
raphael@psi.co.at

Does the player work (ie, is the music mounted where it wants it to be?) and is /proc mounted?

Hugo

Yes, the player works till I try to change the playlist.
Everything is mounted in it's place.
The ext2-fs are read-only and /proc is mounted read-write.

Btw. now that I have moved empeg's init back,
I can't seem to get my shell back.
After the special echo it says:
server.cpp 745 ( 22): Switching to protocol mode.
You might have some flow control problems, mate
server.cpp 109 ( 22): Got a timeout.

I haven't changed my terminal settings.
Does your init run any etc/rc* scripts I might have?
I guess, I'll have to restore the developer image. :-(

(btw. if anyone wants a empeg-shell on his palm,
can do it with SimpleTerm. But you'll have to set the terminal speed to 19200 baud:
stty -F /dev/ttyS1 19200)

UPDATE: I guess I know what the problem could be:
Since you mount and umount with '-n',
I thought it's a good idea to "ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab",
to get mount and df showing the correct values.
Maybe that's the problem.

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Raphael Wegmann
raphael@psi.co.at

No, we don't rely on /etc/mtab at all - that shouldn't affect it. We don't need any special rc's run to get the player going, it should be ok. Maybe start with the developer image again and change things one at a time until it breaks?

Hugo

I've found a sort of bug when /etc/mtab is linked to /proc/mounts...
If you try to upload tunes when the link is in place, emplode will hang at the checking disc stage. After waiting a while, I got bored and reset the empeg and emplode and tried again, same result.
I use USB for uploads, so I connected a terminal to the empeg via serial and the reson for the hang is clear. fsck has raised a prompt about checking mounted discs being dangeous and are you sure (enter yes/no)...
I removed the link and fsck fails to find mtab, and therfore continues without the prompt.
So now you know.. =)
Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

So .... why don't you consider running e2fsck from your init with the '-y' option,
or run something like

if [ -r /proc/mounts -a -w /etc ]
then
cp -f /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
fi

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Raphael Wegmann
raphael@psi.co.at

Sorry, maybe I didn't make myself clear...
It's only the fsck started by emplode that sits waiting, not anything I've called from my init...
Maybe I can setup an alias for fsck?

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

Great! I have been trying to figure out if it was Beta6a that caused this. Now I know. :>

Kamau Wanguhu
kamau@BORGcube.com
http://www.BORGcube.com