artm

After first success with the RTM8000 GPRS card unfortunately a new problem occured.

Although i am now able to send it AT and AT+ commands there seems to be some weird timing issues. I tried to mail AudioVox for some more detailed specs. Of course they totally neglected my comment on ‘not working in the winCE environment’ and replied that the installer would take care of all port settings. The installer, of course, is only for winCE (or pocketPC, whatever).

Although GPRS is lowest priority now it is still getting me quite frustrated :-(

Have just tested v2jam cd on caracolito with qemu - a cpu emulator. It works albeit slow, but it’s better then buring cds just to find out that i had a type in a script.

a word of warning to all you gentoo users. to get qemu command (which is the one allowing to test complete OSes) you need to set softmmu USE flag:

USE="softmmu" emerge qemu

testing the bootable .iso is then possible with command:

qemu -cdrom morph_mudi-0.3.iso -boot d -m 128

where morph_mudi-0.3.iso is your iso, -boot d sais to boot from emulated cd and -m 128 - to give the virtual machine 128 Mbyte RAM.

Finally found out how to communicate with the AudioVox RTM8000 GPRS card thanks to a posting covering the same card on the Sharp Zaurus.

The crux here seems to be that uart needs to be 16550A instead of 16C950 (reported by kernel) or 16550 (reported by dump_cis). After the correct uart is set a ‘cardctl reset’ is needed. Minicom now finally shows me the correct OK respond to my AT messages :-)

Antoine has asked me to help Simon with getting GPRS modem to work on iPAQs for codex kadanski project. I’ll see what i can do remotely tomorrow, and will take the monster home Wensday next week.

Spent a day in Marnix’ container, debugging the new features of RmR player. The piece is turning into really hitchcocky interactive thriller with ghost trams, weird sound track and nice semi-fake semi-interaction.

New features:

• Intersection movies start centered and then slowly pan in the direction of choice. It works better then panning with participant from the beginning and with new intersection movies gives an illusion of turning. Intersection movies are shorter and two exists are next to each other, so participant spends less time in intersections and more on the streets.
• nominal speed of all intersection movies is a configurable parameter independent of exit speeds. It doesnt make sence coz i ended up setting it to the same value as it would have calculated. but we couldnt know in advance. i have a nagging suspicion that player introduces per frame delay on heavy intersection movies, which causes them to play back slower then requested. Marnix must have wanted to compensate for that by speeding up the intersection movies… He should try setting the parameter to a lesser value - playback_speed = threadmill_speed / nominal_speed so lower nominal speed caused faster playback.

Problems:

• Boris (the sound guy) says audio cues are delayed so he can’t synchronize sound effects with nice precision. I just wrote marnix to switch off log in a terminal that was creating some network traffic… although hardly enough to cause audio cues delay, but you never know
• Playlist doesn’t support audio cues in intro movie. Hmm, what was i thinking?
• Sometimes player seems to miss go m 1 command sent when somebody gets on threadmill. It then keeps on looping intro movie. Suggested solution is to start first movie if speed command was received while in intro. That’ll require me.

Apart from that it’s very cool. I met the guy who made the movies - Noud Heerkens. After working on the same project for 3 years ;)

• seq24 - loop based midi sequencer.
• specimen - MIDI controllable audio sampler
• sweep - an audio editor and live playback tool

v2jam livecd v0.3-alpha have just booted thalamus into X11 with XFCE desktop! lovely. thalamus is terribly slow, but that’s sony’s fault, not morphix’…

ok… what have i installed there and what’s gonna work.

• Blender v2.32 that’s a bit ancient but… let’s see if i manage to create something… OK, blender doesn’t seem to work nicely with XFCE, but i’ve got my first image rendered… i’ll have to mount thalamus’ harddrive to save it later. I like the default scene though, have to create the same for myself ;-)
• GIMP 2.0 notices that it wasn’t installed yet - i have to run it once and save .gimp in /etc/skel. It takes ages to start on thalamus ;( gimp’s image windows show up as little thumbnails in xfce’s icon panel.
• i have to chose different test machine if i want to finish this before September ;-)
• icons panel of the XFCE disappear below the other panel. i’m not sure i need the icons panel at all.
• will swapon /dev/hda1 make any difference? it seems so, but could be “between my ears”. nevertheless, gimping suddenly becomes fun again ;-) ok, it is faster for reall.
• Sodipodi 0.33 - now that i have swap on runs like the wind. i have to add searching and using swap files to init scripts
• i don’t but many people would miss a menu of some sort or another with the programs available…
• Pure Data - just now i’ve found out that i don’t have sound modules loaded. That’s weird because i saw the Knoppix bit recognizing my sound chip. - investigate. Also the externals i’ve installed aren’t preloaded - like with gimp I’ll have to create the default config file. Also figure out if i can set default fount to be somewhat smaller.

That’s OK for a starter… In the next version I hope to have everything ready for creation of the v2_jam logo to use instead of the default XFCE background.

Aha! I read it in README.transition:

Transition to >=2.6.x-wielding base:

Use the tips below, however be aware that you need cloop-utils version 2.0 or higher. You may also use squashfs and zisofs-compressed modules, if you prefer these, however the base module itself (/base/morphix) should be compressed using cloop.

but i must have missed this bit:

• different loadmod.sh needed for mainmodules

gotta check this loadmod.sh out now.

I’ve invented round-robbin todo list to help me keep refreshed on every topic i’m interested in. I don’t allow myself to dive into one topic for a month as i used to, but run through the whole convoluted list of areas and tasks every day. Not that i can cover them all in one day, but at least today the tasks i touched yesterday have lower priority. Hopefully new method will help keep me motivated and all…

would have been nice if somebody has coded a gui for such todolist. not me.

My second attempt to marry agnula/demudi and morphix has failed as well. Morphix’ daddy, alextreme is so offline, that their wiki is down. I thought i read in morphing manual that mainmodule may be squashed instead of clooped but it won’t be mounted. How stupid of me to have used CDR… I’m switching to CD-RW now, my jazz comping tracks slide into oblivion and will have to wait till i have more time for guitar again. (What, till 2010?.. stock would say).

a brief history of v2jam livecd

First i had a look at demudi 1.1.1 live cd, hoping may be to through away some audio software, install some video software and then start patching what i’d got to make it v2jam. I had short discussion on agnula-devel mailing list about knoppix/agnula which made me wonder shouldn’t i use other livecd distribution as a base and later contribute the result to agnula.

I took a look at the list of livecds and have chosen morphix as a starter, with the following justification: i take care of a demudi based video mainmodule, while using the latest base module from alextreme and any appropriate minimodules (e.g. nvidia x/kernel drivers). It appears as if morphix mainmodules could be based on vanilla debian, so, thought i - they could be based on custom debian such as demudi as well.

I had positive experience customizing morphix before, but this time i desided not to start from ready mainmodule but create a snapshot of current debian myself. I used debootstrap to create minimalist chrootable debian, then added demudi servers to my-custom-debian/etc/apt/sources.list and installed some multimedia softwares.

All i thought i have to do after that was to make a mainmodule out of my-custom-debian - i’ve used cloop to create the v0.1 mainmodule on nerve, having spent like a day figuring out the version of cloop that works with linux-2.6.7, then older version to decompress older mainmodules from morphix i wanted to use as a reference… The only little stupid mistake was that i made my mainmod start x environemt with /usr/bin/X11/startxfce4 while the script was in /usr/bin/startxfce4. Duh!

I had to continue on caracolito and cloop didn’t wanna compile (hell knows why) so i just patched my kernel to support squashfs and squashed the corrected mainmodule. Squashfs makes no rediculous claim to ones memory+swap size and mounting it is simpler (well, maybe you can mount cloopped filesystem like that as well, but it’s not documented on the knoppix site so i haven’t try) so i was eager to try it out… But i was out of blank cds.

and then came today and depressing fiasco of squash on morphix. Exciting! ;)