I had always resisted runing Linux on the PowerMac, thinking that the last thing I needed was yet another Linux box in the house. I had tried a couple of times, but it was in the early days of support for the liquid cooling system in the dual-2.5Ghz model and those attempts failed dismally. I figured that by now those issues would be resolved and I would have a much better time.

I assumed that Yellow Dog was still the ‘benchmark’ PPC Linux distro, so I went to their site. I saw a lot of data there about PS3 and Cell; it seems that YDL is transitioning to the cluster and/or research market by focussing on Cell.

The next thing I discovered is the lack of distributions that have a PPC version, even as a secondary platform. My old standby Gentoo still supports PPC, as does Fedora (I think: I saw a reference to downloading a PPC install disk, bit didn’t follow it), but every other major distro has dropped it — openSUSE, for example, with their very latest release (their download page still has a picture of a disc labelled “ppc”, but no such download exists, oops). I guess that since the major producer of desktop PPC systems stopped doing so, the distros saw their potential install base disappear. Unfortunately for those distros, I can see the reverse happening: now that Apple has fully left PPC behind, plenty of folks like me who have moderately recent G4 and G5 hardware and who still want to run a current OS will come to Linux looking for an alternative… I guess time will tell who is right on this one.

So I went to install Gentoo, and to cut a long story short I had exactly the same problem as before: critical temperature condition leading to emergency system power-off. I found that if I capped the CPU speed to 2Ghz I could stay up long enough to get things built, but then the system refused to boot because it couldn’t find the root filesystem. Probably something to do with yaboot, SATA drives and OpenFirmware. So again I’m putting it aside.

My next plan was to treat it as a file server. Surely a BSD would support my G5 hardware: after all, Mac OS X is BSD at heart… Well, no. FreeBSD has no support for SATA on ppc, OpenBSD specifically mentioned liquid-cooled G5s as having no support, and I don’t think I saw any ppc support on NetBSD more recent than G3 [1].

This is one of the things that annoys me about the computer industry: that somehow it’s okay to so completely disregard your older releases. What if the automotive industry worked that way?

So I may yet try Fedora, or give the game away for another year or so and see what the situation looks like then.

[1] I may have mixed up a couple of these details.

Edit: Gentoo’s yaboot has managed to make it so that I can’t boot Mac OS X on the machine any more.  Oh dear.

I’ve been a user of Cisco IP phones, buying 7960s and a couple of 7970s through a well-known internet site (maybe it starts with an “e”, not sure).  The phones have been excellent, and I’ve even written a few XML apps to supplement their use here.  The 7960s are getting a bit dated now, however, and I found myself contemplating buying 7971s (or even something newer, like the 7965 or 7975).  Before I committed myself further into the relationship with Cisco, though, I thought about what I was really getting out of using Cisco phones.

Like many users of second-hand Cisco gear, I only purchased the hardware.  I do occasionally succumb to a nagging feeling of being an “outlaw” (at least in the eyes of Cisco), but admittedly that feeling usually only comes when I find out that Cisco has released another new version of SIP software that I can’t get because I haven’t paid for SmartNet.  The last time I had this thought though, I had a realisation: even if I did pay for SmartNet, the only thing I’d get would be the firmware: Cisco will only support their phone software when connected to their CallManager server (yes, even the SIP firmware).  Anyone running Cisco phones against anything other than CUCM gets no support from Cisco in the event something doesn’t work–and based on the information floating around, the problems are many.

So basically I would be paying Cisco to allow me to run one of the worst SIP implementations in embedded existence, with no opportunity to report problems with it in my environment.  Hmm, let me think about that for a minute…

At around the same time, I happened across the NerdVittles site, and in particular the post where NerdUno nominated the Aastra 57i as the “World’s Best Asterisk Phone“.  I started to do some research into it, and was astounded at the level of support the manufacturer (a Canadian company which a few years ago acquired the telephony business of a little mob called Nortel) and the community provide for this phone and Asterisk.  Looking through the phone manual, I found functions that only work with Asterisk! I found a full set of integration scripts that provide XML applications, right through to automatic provisioning tools.  Possibly the best thing was that on the product page for their phones — right there on the page that descibes the product — are links to current versions of firmware, documentation, XML application development guides, even a Linux-based application to encrypt the phone configuration files.  Not hidden in some obscure hard-to-find portal, or behind a registration-only support site.

I started to think of the possibilities…  I’d be able to freely modify the phone configuration (even via a HTTP interface if I so chose), without having to make trial-and-error changes to a cryptic and totally undocumented configuration file.  I’d be able to write XML apps without having to do laborious debugging to cater for why the parser was choking on XML that was perfectly okay according to the documentation but apparently tripped over an undocumented field length restriction or character encoding limitation.  I could get access to things like Visual Voicemail, BLF, integration with Asterisk functions like day/night mode and call parking.  I could keep the phones up-to-date for new functions and bug fixes.  With a click of a mouse I could get proper Australian tones!

So, I decided to give one a try.  Finding nothing on that “e” site I went looking for a vendor locally, and found several places that would sell one to me (legitimate e-tailers, no less!  Zounds!  A VoIP phone with a warranty?  You jest!).  It took a while for my chosen vendor to source it for me, but I’ve had it now for a couple of weeks.  It’s probably going to take a while for it to live up to it’s full potential in my installation, but since that potential is so much greater than what I have been able to do with the Ciscos I think I’m already ahead.

More in the coming weeks as the Aastra settles in.

The first thing was obviously to get hold of the audio file. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, thanks to Google pointing me to a piece of software called MacTracker. MacTracker is actually a reference guide for Apple products (computers all the way back to the Macintosh XL, the MessagePads, printers, displays, even iPods and mice), but part of the information it holds about the computers is their startup and death chimes.

There’s no option in MacTracker to export the audio files, but by opening the app package (“Show Package Contents” in Finder) it’s possible to navigate to where the chime sound files are stored. Then from Finder, all I had to do was zap the file to the phone via Bluetooth. On the phone, opening the Bluetooth message gave me an option to save the “music” file, which I did — this adds the file to the Music Player, but importantly makes it easily selectable in the configuration of the alert tones.

So now when I receive an SMS I hear the death chime of a Macintosh LC, and the startup sound of the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh alerts me to incoming e-mail. I’m going to apply similar configuration to my desktops: on-and-off for the last ten years I’ve been using a Homer Simpson soundbite to advise incoming mail, and it’s a bit tired now…

Next task will be to replace the startup sound on my N810 with something a bit retro-Mac!

I think what finally did it for me was the App Store. I love being able to simply go to an app on the device and easily look for software, installing what I like with no fuss. I especially like the fact that my downloads are synced with my computer, so that I don't have to keep track of all the individual items I've installed (unlike my phone; I can't think where all the sis and sisx files for different stuff I've installed might be).

My Facebook friends will know that I'm much more active there suddenly. Why? The Facebook app on the Touch — I no longer have to start up a computer or open a browser to update my status or reply to comments. I had a bit of this function with Fring's Facebook interface on my phone, but the large screen of the Touch makes things like this much more friendly.

I came very close to getting an iPhone actually — but not to use as a phone. This was after I'd realised that it's just as valuable as an Internet-connected device as an actual phone. The cost of iPhone service is still a bit prohibitive to me though, especially for an occasional-use device.

One of the things that had turned me off was the closed nature of the iTunes ecosystem (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, iTunes). People sometimes ask me about Skype, and I say that the worst thing about it is that it Just Works. I mean, it's a closed system with no interconnections other than those provided by Skype themselves — by this nature it should fail, and yet because it works (arguably) better than any other desktop VoIP product it enjoys immense success. Same goes for Apple's stuff: the iTunes ecosystem Works And Works Bloody Well.

I've been thinking for ages about sync for calendar and contacts and stuff; I've been hunting for services and software and tools for ages. I could build something myself, and indeed started to (I've looked at Google Apps, used Chandler, checked out Ovi, and played with Sync4J before it was called Funambol). I could spend time and effort coming up with something myself…

Or I could just buy an iPod.

I’ve had this phone for just on a week now, and it’s certainly one of the best phone purchases I’ve ever made. In a nutshell, the key things about it are:

* QWERTY keyboard, in a form factor not much larger than the N70. Importantly, it’s much smaller than the E61 that preceded it (now there’s a phone that was just MADE of ugly). Despite it’s size the keyboard is amazingly easy to type on, although I may have to update this after I give my thumbnails a trim.

* Symbian OS. Maybe I’m biased, as the owner of a Psion 5, but to me Symbian has an edge over other phone OSes. Not only with the functions in the handset and Nokia’s Series 60 interface, but the range of third-party apps for Symbian (or Series 60 specifically) is great. Almost straight after charging the battery I downloaded PuTTY (SSH client) and “vejotp” (S/Key one-time-password utility). Plus, the recent news that Nokia intends to open-source Symbian is a great thing.

* Nokia Maps and A-GPS. While the iPhone glitterati download the entire UBD or Melways every time they walk down the street thanks to Google Maps, I get quick GPS mapping for zero download (the last few times I’ve used it, the download counter has stayed stuck on “0.0kb” even though A-GPS is supposed to cost a bit of data every startup). It’s not the most accurate GPS ever made, for sure, but it’ll do me for now at least.

* Built-in podcast support. I was getting more and more frustrated with the way that Amarok and iPod fought with each other over my podcasts. It never seemed to work as well as it did on iTunes! Now, I can use the device I download the podcasts with to listen to them as well. It’s self-contained, tidy (no more podcasts mixed in with the music library and causing havoc), elegant.

* Wi-fi capability and SIP client. Being able to connect to the home network obviously means that I can do things like update my podcasts without having to second-mortgage the house to pay for HSDPA data. The SIP client is very cool too: I’ve connected it to my Asterisk box, and now have a cordless home phone and mobile in one device.

* Solid construction. It’s got to be the most sturdy-feeling phone I’ve ever owned. The case is metal, and it has a nice weight to it. The buttons feel solid, almost like real keyboard keys.

* Drop-dead gorgeous. I got the grey version, the metal casing looks like titanium and has a glossy finish (which is a little prone to fingerprints, but cleans easily). The screen is just amazing, usable in daylight, bright and colourful and incredibly high resolution.

I’ll mention more as time goes on, but for now I am very happy!

At the moment it’s still running Windows XP Tablet Edition, but that’s only because a Hardy Heron install DVD is quite some way away from me right now.

I just trained Microsoft speech recognition and this paragraph has been dictated using speech recognition.  The recognition rate is actually quite good for the amount of training I’ve done, although I am having to go back and correct quite a few minor errors.

Back to handwriting recognition, which is outstanding: it’s only just now, as I write on the screen of this device, that I realise how poor my handwriting has become! Almost certainly this is due to lack of practice and under-use! I can tell as I’m writing that its recognition is somewhat dictionary-based, as if I pause or lift the pen it will make a guess abort what I’ve written which it will change as I complete the word.

Credit where credit is due, I think tablet Windows looks pretty good. Having used it before just putting Ubuntu on, I’ll be expecting a bit more from Linux…

On the hardware side, the machine looks quite sturdy and solid — so much so it’s a bit or the weighty side. I did install the additional battery pack though, and I’m sure that if I was adopting a proper tablet-PC posture it wouldn’t feel as heavy as it does. It has a 3G modem built-in, which works fine with my Telstra USIM (that’s how I’m posting this now), and the usual complement of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, PC-Card, SD  and infra-red. It even has a place to stow the pen-stylus.

As I said, I don’t have a Linux disc handy to start setting up properly so the big Linux question will have to wait for a while. Some early Googling shows that there is support for most of the hardware components in it (the digitiser is Wacom, the Wi-Fi is Intel 3945, I’ve even seen support for the 3G adapter. It’s the interface and application level that I’m worried about — the state of handwriting recognition, whether XRandR lives up to the promise, and so on. I’ll post more as I get used to it and see what it can do…

In the past when I’ve done this kind of recovery I copied the details of the partition table and copied each partition in turn off the failed drive. This time however in my haste (or something) I imaged the entire 80GB in a single file by using dd pointing at the disk device node (/dev/sda, say) instead of each partition.

When it came to restore, this brought me undone. I tried the reverse of what I’d done to create the image, just dd to the disk device node, but at around the point where the first partition would have ended it failed with an I/O error.

Assuming that I did actually have a valid image of the entire drive, I needed to find a utility that would treat a disk file as an image of an entire drive, partition table and all. Then, theoretically, I could copy each partition out of the source file in the same way I was used to.

As usual, the lazyweb came through for me. I found a beaut utility called kpartx, apparently part of multipath-tools. I also found some blog posts describing how to use the tool for what I needed. What kpartx does by itself is scan a block device or normal file (significant, as I’m sure when I first used it I had to use losetup) and create device-mapper mappings to the partitions it finds. kpartx was just what I needed!

This blog post describes the process I went through (and no losetup here either). For me, I let kpartx create device-mapper nodes for the partitions in the disk image, and then used dd to copy from each of those partitions to the real partitions in the new disk (carefully created using fdisk to match the originals). Then I set up grub on the new disk, and installed it into the laptop. It worked first go!

So now on its third hard drive, this Sony Vaio (same one with the weird wireless issue in Hardy) gets yet another lease on life. The battery is almost expired though, so I think it won’t be long before it goes to the Old Hardware Shelf…

Edit: I realised my confusion about losetup. kpartx uses losetup under the covers if it detects that you’re trying to work on a disk file instead of a block device. When you use the -a or -l switches to kpartx, if it needs to it straps up a loop device for you and automatically works on that; running kpartx with the -d removes not only the device-mapper nodes but the loopback node as well.

Sure enough, I put a different disk in the laptop and it worked, and the original disk in a USB caddy failed (but only after working successfully a couple of times, leading me to think it was a transient problem and reassemble the laptop, at which point it failed again… sigh).

Through persistence and determination (and a couple of goes in the freezer) I managed to get a copy of the disk onto another drive. I then went shopping, but decided to check the warranty on the dud drive: lo-and-behold, it still had nearly four years of a five year warranty to run. Better yet, unlike the Western Digital I had to send at my own cost to Singapore for replacement, Seagate have an address in Australia that can be used.

Sod it, I said, anything more than the original 80GB (since for less than what I paid for the 80GB a year ago I’m looking at 160GB or more!) is wasted on this particular machine, so I completed the RMA, found a box to pack the drive in, and sent it off.

The address in Australia is a mail forwarder to Seagate in Singapore. I had to keep that in mind when I checked their order status page, which a week later was still showing “awaiting your return”. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the page changed to “shipped”. Looking a bit closer I could see that my 80GB drive must have put on a bit of weight on the way to its birthplace, as Seagate was sending me a 100GB drive in return!

Having left Singapore last Thursday the drive arrived on Monday, but due to work commitments (plus having to fix the Slug first) I wasn’t able to do anything with it until today. Stay tuned for the recovery exercise…

Let me get something straight: Shepherd is the bees-knees of EPG grabbers for Australian MythTV users. If you’re a MythTV user in .au and not running Shepherd, stop reading this right now and go and update your system to use it–you’ll be glad you did. If I had just looked at some of the output it has been generating since OzTivo announced it’s changes, most of the agro I’ve suffered the last few hours would have been avoided.

In a nutshell, Shepherd is a “meta-grabber”. It includes code that can get program data from a dozen or so sources, and keeps looking up sources until it fills your listings with data goodness. It automatically updates these individual source grabbers as well, so you should never need to worry about its up-to-date-ness (more on that later though). It also fetches extra program data from IMDB and TVDB, and can even automatically grab station icons for you. Highly, highly recommended.

I could see that some of my EPG data was coming from OzTivo because I had seen the notes that they had put in the program data advising of the API change. The weird thing I saw was that for a program I was recording in the same timeslot each day, sometimes the message would be there and other times not. While I thought that this was a little strange, I figured that the OzTivo folks were just being overly cautious and trusted Shepherd to do all the updates it needed.

Then, ever since Sunday morning when the southern states *didn’t* switch back from DST, I’ve had recording times out by an hour–programs trying to record an hour early. So as I mentioned, I had ye-olde timezone data on the backend, which can’t have helped depending on the data source (although I’m trying to work out if this actually is a contributor as I would have thought it would send the recordings an hour late… plus, others who have confirmed their timezone data have had the same problems). For a couple of programs, I actually had double entries: one an hour too early, then a second one at the right time. This was weird, and I still can’t explain it!

A manual run of mythfilldatabase showed why I was getting the repeated OzTivo API messages. Shepherd had downloaded the updated grabber alright, but the new version has a Perl dependency that wasn’t satisfied and it couldn’t run. Rather than bail out, Shepherd elected just to keep running with the old grabber. Given the circumstances, I’m still deciding how I feel about that. :-

So once I was confident that the grabbers were working okay again, I decided to get the EPG straight. I remembered that mythfilldatabase will not replace any existing data it thinks is valid, which is why only data post-April-5-or-so looked nice again. So, with a mailing list post or two as encouragement, I truncated (database-admin-speak for “deleted all the data from”) the “program” and “programrating” fields in the mythconverg database and ran mythfilldatabase. After about 20 minutes, voila, fixed guide data!

So now I’m thinking of how I can alert myself to a problem with Shepherd. I used to just check the result of the last mythfilldatabase run through Information Centre or mythweb, but since Shepherd ends cleanly so does mythfilldatabase. Looks like I might have to come up with something hackish to look for Perl runtime errors in the mythfilldatabase log and do a Nagios passive service check or something… Sigh, as if I needed another little project to keep me busy…

My latest exercise was an update to the RSS reader I’ve used for ages. I found RSS2Cisco ages ago and have used it quite successfully, but I’ve never really been satisfied with its way of displaying the whole feed in one text page. It works well for news feeds, where all you get is a headline and a teaser, but for things like blogs it’s not suitable (you’re lucky to get through one posting before hitting the limit of a Cisco XML text page). I wanted an interface like a “normal” RSS reader, where it lists the items in the feed in a menu and you then choose an item to be displayed.

Sounded simple, and wasn’t too hard to hack rss2cisco around to make it do my bidding (it’s not optimal yet as every time you read an item it pulls down the entire feed again). The problem I faced was in making the thing work consistently between the 7960 phones and the 7970s.

All my phones are running fairly recent SIP code, but for some reason the 7960 has an ancient XML parser. By ancient, I mean that the level of the XML SDK it supports is tied back to Call Manager 3.0. The 7970s, on the other hand, have support for a much more recent SDK and support some of the fancy operations that you can’t do on a 7960 unless you’re running SCCP firmware. At first I thought that there might have been a hardware limitation and that Cisco couldn’t fit the extra smarts of a client for later SDKs, but the SCCP code can’t be that much simpler than SIP that they’d have more room to fit a better XML browser and all the other features the SCCP code has over SIP…

So the SIP firmware for 7960 has a junk XML browser. You’d think, then, that the 7970 was easier to work with than the 7960… Wrong! Valid XML that worked quite happily on the 7960 would fail with a cryptic “XML Error[4]: Parse Error” message. It took quite a bit of time and quite a bit of trial-and-error to work out some of the dependencies (32 seems to be a magic number, folks…).

Call Manager XML (CMXML) is supposed to be really simple, but I can only imagine how complex it might get to deliver an app with a consistent interface if you had a number of different phone models to support — I have only two, and I’m looking at two different versions of my app!

In their defence, Cisco have provided a way for the phone to identify itself and its SDK level when it makes a request. A set of HTTP headers identify the device, and one specifically states the SDK version supported by the phone client. Reading these headers would allow a developer to adjust the output of their app to cater for the various phones — one app, but multiple output capabilities.

It strikes me though as a heck of a lot of work for limited return. These are phones intended for corporate installations, so it’s almost a given that there will be a full-function computer at the same desk. Why would a company invest that much effort developing and supporting an internal application for a single platform that’s tied to desks, when they could write it as a web app and deliver it practically anywhere? I’m starting to see why the Internet is not exactly awash with sites selling CMXML apps…

Having said that though, I love my timezone calculator. With three button presses I can find out the time in any of my six favourite timezones, and I can find any timezone in the world with only a few more presses. An application somewhere on the web couldn’t be anywhere near that speedy for me, and a desktop app would have to be some kind of widget already running and configured (or be the KDE Clock applet, all it takes is a mouseover… shame I’m stuck with GNOME for my work desktop).

So I’m not too keen to apply much development effort to my XML apps. I will stick them on my development site some time soon, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort to keep them functional. The Qantas one, for instance, is totally dependent on the URL and query format of the Qantas WAP application, which is obviously subject to change at any time. I wonder sometimes if a WAP-XML gateway would be useful, but then I think about the effort of writing a system to translate pages delivered over a dying protocol to an interface that never got off the ground…

In case you’re curious what the RSS reader looks like:

and something a bit more voluminous from my blog:

Yes, I am a bit proud of it, even though it’s rubbish…

My current phone is a Nokia N70, which has served me well for a couple of years, but I’m not keen to use it too much for fring because I don’t have a mobile data plan (and my phone company charges fairly steeply for casual data). Besides, it’s only UMTS 3G so the data rate is not great (better than GSM data, but only occasionally so). What I really need is one of the newer devices around that has Wi-Fi built in. Something like the N80, new N82 or E51, or N95. That way I could use fring at home (which is where I am most of the time nowadays) and not have to worry about data costs.

Thinking about spending that kind of money though (again, my phone company is happy to talk to me about upgrading my handset, but the kind of plan I’d have to go onto to get a phone like that would be insane) makes me wonder about other devices. Something like the N800, or even a new N810. I don’t think fring is available on Nokia’s tablet devices, but with the alternate OS platform on the N8x0 I could install just about any kind of IM client I want. Plus I’d have a nice device to web-surf, program MythTV, check mail, and various other tasks.

What about other devices? The Asus EeePC has tweaked my curiosity, but I think it would end up being just a bit too large to fit in with the kind of usage I’m imagining for this type of device. Blackberry is a bit scary to me, it doesn’t really seem to be a general-usage consumer-oriented device (more a corporate connect-back-to-the-proprietary-box-in-the-server-room kind-of thing). The iPod touch is out as well: it’s closed nature would frustrate the heck out of me (it’s got a browser, but you can’t load anything on it…). The only other manufacturer I’d think about for a mobile device right now is Sony-Ericsson: Ericsson manufactured a couple of the nicest phones I’ve ever owned, but Sony has ruined them for me. I’m just not interested in getting back onto the hardware-to-lock-users-to-the-Sony-tower treadmill.

It’s all just navel-gazing, unfortunately. Realistically, I can’t justify dropping a wad of money on some new shiny just to satisfy what is probably just a bit of a personal fad. I think I’ll wait a bit longer and see how quickly the newly-released N95-8GB drops in price, or how far it pushes the price of the old N95 down — ditto the N810 and N800.

Oh, and I’ll wait for fring to fix my biggest issue: no support for Jabber. Queries on their forum on this have gone unanswered for almost a year. Technically it can’t be a big leap for them, as they have support for Google Talk!

While I did a heap of research about PoE and IEEE 802.3af, the hints I got about using a hacked cable with a standard 802.3af switch to power a Cisco phone came almost exclusively from the voip-info.org wiki. Everything I’d seen about this trick relied on the use of a crossover cable to fix the problem where the phone using the Cisco pre-standard expects the power in the opposite polarity to that delivered by 802.3af.

When I’d had a go previously, the info I had told me that I had to get power onto the spare pairs in the Ethernet cable, because the Cisco pre-standard used the spare pairs for power and not the data pairs. This was a problem as my switch provided Type A PoE, which is power-over-data-pairs. In the end I figured that I’d have to come up with some kind of electronics to get the power off the data pairs and onto the spare pairs.

My friendly reader informed me, however, that Cisco pre-standard phones take power from the data pairs as well as the spare pairs! Nothing I’d seen indicated that this was a possibility. So I pulled out the hacked-up cable I’d used previously and gave it another try… but it didn’t work.

I tried a bunch of alternatives that I probably tried before as well. I tried putting the sense resistor across the spare pairs instead of the data pairs, I tried switching the spare pairs around. But, since others had only ever reported success with a crossover cable, it had never occurred to me to try a straight cable instead. A bit of resoldering later, another try, and it worked!

Tried it with all my 7960s and it worked fine. So it looks like some 802.3af switches put power on the pairs in the opposite polarity to others (which is not a problem usually, as 802.3af devices have a bridge rectifier that allows them to handle either polarity).

Thanks to my friendly reader, I now have a way to power all my Cisco phones via PoE! Yay! The only caveat (one that I’ve only seen briefly mentioned anywhere) is the extra load placed on the cable by the 25kohm sense resistor — doubt it’s significant, but over a few phones it might add up.

My previous post talked about problems I was having with the network connection dropping out after an hour on a WPA-PSK network.  When last I checked, the most recent firmware was no improvement in that regard.  However, I checked again last week and a couple of new updates to firmware have been released.  You need to go to Linksys’ US site to download the recent firmware though (Australia only has the 1.02.12S version that is a problem for me, while 1.03.18S is on the US site).

I also had problems using the phone menus to do the upgrade.  The WIP330 has a menu selection that lets you enter a URL for the phone to download its own firmware update, but this didn’t work for me.  I suspect it’s because the Linksys site that the firmware is hosted on is using an expired SSL certificate…  Downloading the file to my desktop and uploading the firmware through the phone’s web page worked fine as an alternative method.

The phone has been on my WPA network all day continuously now, and it makes and receives calls without drama.  I’ve never had the problem that some folks report where the phone ignores incoming calls.  So, as a phone, it’s functional and I’ll be including it in my ring groups and queues now.  As a Wi-Fi device, though, it’s still short.  For something that’s supposedly built on Windows CE, there’s precious little PDA or network function in it.  

The two things I thought I could do with the unit (other than just use it as a phone) have both come up busted.  First was to use the “web cam” function to grab rain radar images from the Bureau of Meteorology — but the function only seems to work with actual web cams that generate a Windows Media stream, and not just an image that refreshes at intervals.  Next, when I found that you can use the web interface to upload and download data such as the phonebook, I thought I could write something that dumped my LDAP contact database into the right format to upload to it.  I still could, if I could hack the crappy VB/.NET encrypted file format they use on it.  Bah, humbug.

There’s talk on the ‘Net about folks who load CE device drivers and play with it from Windows, so maybe if I was a Windows user there would be more I could do with it.

One thing I will do with it is try it on public Wi-Fi.  That’s the only differentiator I can see between it and a normal cordless phone attached to an ATA — you certainly shouldn’t buy one of these just to use at home.  If it’s fairly easy to strap up to public Wi-Fi then it becomes much more useful (but then I have to wonder how often I’m near public Wi-Fi and needing to make a call I couldn’t make on a normal mobile… it might have been useful when I was stuck in Melbourne airport for three hours the other week though).

Now that it stays on the network I can use it as a phone.  Fine.  I still regret not knowing in advance about the iPod touch, because I would rather have put that money toward the touch…

I had problems with my MythTV frontend playing particular recordings; I eventually worked out that it was HD recordings it couldn’t manage (this helped me discover the switch to HD of a previously SD stream coming out of Ten).  I figured that a swap of hardware under the frontend would be nice, to get a better CPU platform and better output capability under it.  I went shopping at my local friendly poota-shop’s website, and came up with a couple of contenders.

Looking at their site (and at the ASUS site), most of the integrated-video boards I saw seemed to be using nVidia chips.  Confident I was going to be making a sound decision, I set off to the store and ended up leaving with an Asus M2A-VM HDMI under my arm.  The clincher was my need for a real S/PDIF output, which the M2A-VM board has on the little riser-card it uses to provide HDMI, S-Video and Component video out.

Some of you will already have seen my error.  :)

The nVidia board with HDMI I had seen on the ASUS site was the M2N-VM HDMI.  The M2A-VM HDMI is obviously an ATI chipset board.  In my quest for S/PDIF, to save myself a few bucks for a header adapter, I again shot myself in the foot with the ATI bullet.

Sure enough, I had huge problems getting the thing to work.  Frame rates in MythTV, no matter what I did, were abysmal.  I tried installing Mythbuntu again to see if later drivers would help (compared to those on the existing Knoppmyth R5F1 build I am running), to no avail[1].

I was considering lumping it, and sitting on it until things catch up and I can make it work, but I think I’ll just go back to the store and try and switch it for either the M2N-VM DVI (no S/PDIF) or M2N-VM DH (this has onboard S/PDIF but also costs an extra AU$40 thanks to all the WiFi and other guff it comes with).  Unfortunately the store doesn’t have the M2N-VM HDMI, which would let me keep the future capability for  a HDMI-capable display, but by the time I look at needing HDMI I’m likely to be needing to replace the thing again anyway.

To add insult to injury, when I put the old MythTV frontend box back I used a low profile case which meant I had to leave out the old nVidia FX5200 it was running off and go with the onboard Via graphics.  I had heard that some of the Via chips had MPEG2 smarts, and it seems to be true: this old box with what I thought was the crappy cheapo onboard graphics chip now seems to have no trouble with HD output to VGA.

Sigh.

[1] Apparently some victimsowners of the M2A-VM HDMI have had success downloading the very latest drivers directly from ATI rather than sticking with those provided by their distro.  If I get time to give that a run I’ll report.

I’m doing the cascading hardware trick…  But instead of buying the new top-end rig and finding something to do with the surplus gear, I found something new to do with my existing desktop and had to replace it.  AMD’s 4×4 stuff looks good, but by the time I got two CPUs, a Socket F board and some new RAM I’d be in for around AU$1500 which I just can’t justify at the moment.

A colleague at work posted that the Q6600 was at his fave online store for AU$340.  Not believing this could be true, I went to my fave online store — which has a shopfront just down the road — and saw it for AU$330.

Beads of sweat started to form on my upper lip…  My left eyelid started to twitch uncontrollably…  Well, not really, but I’m sure you know the symptoms of Shiny Mania!

So I have some Intel kit again (not counting laptops).  The last Intel chip I bought was a thermonuclear 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it’s actually running the system that will get replaced in this project.  Ever since I bought my first Athlon I’ve wanted to be AMD-only, but it seems that the performance gong belongs to Intel right now.  I’m confident that AMD will get it back with the next Opteron generation, and that will likely be what I replace the current Opteron server with one day.  For now, I’ll console myself with building a system in an architecture called “amd64″ on an Intel chip.

I’ll save the details of the buildup for another set of posts (what I’m building now is the P4 replacement, not the new desktop) but I will say this: It’s Quick.  And it’s got four cores.

A little while back I decided that my next portable audio device would not be an iPod.  I really don’t want to be tied to the Mac for something as simple as music and podcasts, and figured that I must be able to do these things with Linux.  To this end, I experimented with using Amarok to talk to my iPod but it just didn’t work well — corrupted playlists, Amarok refusing to simply unmount the iPod without giving it a soft reset, which caused it to reboot and remount again.  Tools like Rhythmbox and gtkpod were no different, which is hardly surprising since they all use the same libraries for actually talking to the iPod.  So, I decided that as long as the iPod still lived it would be enslaved to the Mac, and my music would stay managed by iTunes until such time as I could justify replacing the iPod.

Creative nearly had me a few months ago: the Zen Vision:W (I think that’s what it’s called, their wide-screen video device) has a good feature set…  but it just didn’t look right.  The 60GB version was too chunky — too thick, mainly — and the interface just felt wrong (although I concede that a little bit of time cleansing myself of iPod interface conditioning would probably have got me right).

Now, Apple has released a new range of iPods… and has again made the competition look old.

Many of you out there will be unfamiliar with the hype around the iPhone — as it is a North-America-only (USA-only?) device at this time, that’s not surprising.  However if you have seen it (or even only pictures of it) and you are outside iPhone-owning territory you may well have wished that the iPod functionality of the iPhone was available as a standalone device unencumbered by the regulatory crap that a phone has to comply with.

Well, wish no longer — that’s pretty much what the new iPod touch is.  All I’ve seen about this thing is on web pages — firstly on Wired and then on Apple’s web site — but I am head-over-heels in device-lust with this thing.

There isn’t much I can say about the features that Apple can’t say better (besides, this wasn’t meant to be a ra-ra post for the thing).  Check it out at Apple’s site: locally to me, that’s here at Apple Australia.  Of note though are the fact that it has Wi-Fi built-in, and comes with the Safari web browser, integrated YouTube browser, and integrated connectivity to the iTunes Music Store (you can buy music from the Store on the iPod, and when you next sync to iTunes it will merge the purchased music into your iTunes library).

I have to say though, the biggest surprise I got was when I went to the Apple Store to check the price.  While waiting for the page to load, I did a swift estimation and figured that the 16GB version would be over AU$800.  I nearly fell on the floor when the figure came up: AU$549.  My current iPod cost me around US$420 at a time when the Aussie dollar was lucky to fetch 60 US cents.

The one feature which took my breath away is probably one that I will never see though.  Apple has penned a deal with Starbucks to hook the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store component of the iPod touch into Starbucks free Wi-Fi.  Whenever you walk into an enabled Starbucks, the iPod touch automatically recognises Starbucks’ Wi-Fi network and hooks up.  Wait, it gets better.  When this happens, your iPod touch will show the details of the song playing in the store at the time, and give you a link to the iTunes WiFi Music Store to buy the music.

Why did that take my breath away?  Because right back to when I was at Uni, this kind of integration has been foretold but has always been “somewhere in the near future”.  The petrol pump that would automatically register the car’s chip and charge the fuel to the owner’s account.  The food packaging, fridges and pantries that would update the shopping list on your wristwatch, and the supermarket trolley that read the shopping list and displayed the layout of the supermarket with the locations of your needed items shown.  This is the “vision of the near future” that I was given by technologists (and instead we got RFID).

I was once standing in the Borders bookstore in South Yarra and heard a lovely song that moved me deeply (and no, I’m not prone to being overcome by store music).  A fortnight later I was in Singapore and heard the same song while having breakfast with Susan in the hotel restaurant.  On both occasions there was no-one around who would have been able to assist me locating the song — such is the way of telco-piped ambiance — and I was left to Googling remembered fragments of lyrics (successfully, I must say, for that’s how I was introduced to The Sundays).  I’ve never bought music online, but if I could have looked at the device in my pocket and instantly known what that song was, they’d have gotten a sale for sure.

Thinking about the technology behind it, it really is madenningly simple (says he with perfect hindsight).  Something like a DAAP server (wouldn’t even have to be one in each store) streaming to the store’s Wi-Fi, and an AirPort with an amp and speakers attached (instead of the usual piped music affair) picking up the same DAAP stream.  Regardless, to think that at least a little bit of that “vision of the future” is at last a reality is, well… nice.  I feel a little older, but in a good way.

Alas, the iPod touch guided tour video shows the start of the rollout of the “Starbucks” feature: a map of the continental USA, with New York City marked for September, Seattle in October, then LA February 2008 and Chicago in March.  Apple’s iTunes Starbucks site says “major metropolitan areas in the US by the end of 2008″.  No mention of internationals.  Sigh.  Oh, but the feature works with iTunes on a PC and with the iPhone too (so now we have three ways to miss out, right?).

The new iPod range is available now, with the exception of my new objet d’adore which is on the Apple Store for advance ordering with availability at the end of September.  Other newcomers are massive capacity iPod Video: now called “iPod classic” and starting with 80GB capacity or go to a whopping 160GB version, new iPod nano that’s shorter and wider than the old one but now does video, and new colours for the iPod shuffle.

So much for my tech spending freeze…  I figure I’ll spend the next few weeks researching what life would be like with one of these — whether going down to 16GB storage would actually hurt or not; how movies really look in H.264; whether I’d have to re-encode all my movies, or worse, encode them in H.264 as well as MP4 (since the few times I tried to play back H.264 encodes using XBMC were less than joyous); whether the video functions would even be relevant since all I ever do is listen to podcasts.  Then, when the thing is actually in stores… just go and get one anyway.

Tech addiction sucks like that.

Some time ago I saw some reports of Linksys releasing a couple of Wi-Fi VoIP handsets.  Reviews looked moderately promising, but as one of the devices (the “prestige” version) was based on Windows CE I was disappointed in the lost potential of the device.  But then I saw that eBay listing, and I jumped immediately into Gadget Acquisition Syndrome justification mode.  ”Sure, it’s based on Windows CE, but haven’t you always told people that you believe in horses-for-courses?” said my inner gadget-junkie.

So about a fortnight later the thing arrived.  I charged it for a decent amount of time, then configured it for my wireless.

“Failed to connect”.

Google then revealed a litany of people being driven crazy by this device’s inability to connect to a WPA-PSK network.  At this point I began to feel very much like Stuart Langridge of LugRadio fame, who only discovered after buying a new laptop that his research had failed him and he had indeed bought a laptop of “military-grade proprietariness” (as I seem to recall one of his fellow LugRadio presenters described it).  Had I known that in 2007 a manufacturer of networking equipment (backed by probably the biggest name in corporate and Internet networking today) could release a device that would not connect to a secure network created by THEIR OWN BRAND OF ACCESS POINT (a Linksys WRT54GS[1]), I might have researched that issue further.

Some hope was provided in the form of a firmware update.  Unfortunately, like most pieces of networking kit, firmware updates are delivered over the network…  In this case, the thing couldn’t connect to the network!  I had to shut off encryption on my network for the length of time it took to perform the update — which was doubled by the fact that the firmware on my unit required an interim upgrade to a staging release before the final update (to wip330_v1_02_12S) could be applied.

So with firmware upgraded and encryption re-enabled on my wireless, I tried again…

Same error.

At this point I was very keen to follow this advice and eject the rotten device from my life, but on that page I found the hint that got things working: my access point had AES as well as TKIP enabled, and the WIP330 seems to choke on AES.  Disabling AES on the access point finally got the WIP330 on the network.  At this point my son wanted to watch something via XBMC, and I found that the client Wi-Fi device through which his XBox attaches still had AES defined so could not connect to the network…  Turn AES back on, get the other device attached again, disable AES in it, disable AES in the access point again, and I was set.

Or so I thought.  Later in the day, the WIP330 was off the network again.  Trying to re-connect to my network brought failure, but power-cycling the device got it online again.  Sure enough though, an hour later it was off the network.

One hour.  3600 seconds.  The (default) rekeying interval of a WPA-PSK network.  The chuffing thing fails to complete rekeying and drops the wireless connection.  This time Google has been no help — I guess not enough people persisted through the AES problem to have the thing on the network long enough to hit the rekeying failure.

So right now the thing is useless to me.  I’m even contemplating dragging out my old 802.11b access point for the phone (and another couple of old WPA-incapable devices) to run on, but I think the last thing my neighbourhood needs is another 2.4GHz wireless network.

To try and balance this, I will mention a couple of things I like about it.  While it was on the network, it was easy to connect to Asterisk and get talking.  The device is light (bordering on too light) and the screen is just brilliant.  Sound quality was a bit dodgy, but then I haven’t had a chance to use it for long enough to know for sure (and then I was only talking to myself via the Asterisk echo test application).  One other thing that’s nice is that Windows CE is largely hidden.  There is a browser on the device, which uses the Windows flag as its progress spinner, but other than that it’s out of the way and not screaming “look at me, i’m CE”.

Like I said, however, the fact that in 2007 Linksys can release a device that has such problems just getting connected to a network is a great disappointment.  At this stage I think the best that can come of this device is that enough bad press is spread that they don’t sell at their RRP, forcing the price down and making it affordable enough for some crafty Linux hackers who could put an Open firmware on it.  Or, hope against hope, perhaps Linksys will see their channel back-up with units that won’t move, and switch to a Linux firmware themselves to get them going.

In the meantime, I’ll keep Googling for “wip300 wpa-psk piece of junk”…

[1] To be fair, my WRT54GS is running OpenWRT and not the stock Linksys firmware.  But the binary that provides WPA-PSK in OpenWRT does come straight from Linksys’ firmware…

So, points in favour of Apple TV:
* It has convenient TV-out capability
* It should stream content from the Slug, since I installed mt-daapd/Firefly on there
* Inbuilt 802.11n, so I would just have to upgrade to N-capable Wi-Fi to solve a little of my no-wired-network woe
* It seems to be hackable, so a MythTV frontend might not be out of the question
* It’s not an XBox 360, nor is it a Playstation 3

Points against however:
* The hackability is a bit of a question mark, and not really something to rely upon (as Apple may shut the gate on any of it with a software update)
* Like I need another timewasting hardware device in the house
* Without a MythTV frontend, it doesn’t really solve any problems w.r.t the TV-watching problem (even if video can be automatically exported from MythTV in a iTunes/DAAP-friendly format, I’d need to use another interface like MythWeb or a different MythTV frontend to program the MythTV backend)
* Where’s the “TV” in “Apple TV” anyway?  :)  (oh yeah, you plug it into one, of course… )

In a like vein, I’m trying to get LinuxMCE running (so far in a VMware guest) to see if it solves any of my backend troubles.  It looks very promising, but the installer seems to be a bit crumbly — my first install attempt was without sufficient disk space; even after increasing the space the installer just couldn’t get going again.  Lesson learnt, I’m doing the install again with more disk behind it to see what happens.

I was explaining to a friend just the other day about how DVD was different to CD.  ”Audio CDs,” I said, “are a completely different format to data CDs, which meant that the first CD drives for computrs could not even read music CDs.  With DVDs it’s easier because all DVDs are basically data discs — the ones with movies on just have a special directory layout, and the movie is just simple computer files on the disc.”

What an idiot.  How I regret ever saying anything so stupid!

Over the last week I have tried more than a dozen combinations of software on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows to do the job of getting thosse “simple conputer files” off the DVD and onto my server so that we can view them on XBMC.  First complication is the fact that XBMC currently does not understand DVD menus, and only understands how to read a VIDEO_TS directory if it’s on a physical DVD.  So my first grand plan of simply copying VIDEO_TS to my server was a failure.

Here started my journey into ripping and transcoding.  A journey that has taken me from Mac the Ripper and Handbrake, through drip and quickrip, past countless forum pages and mailing list archives and a side-trip into Forty-Two, to arrive at ffmpegX (Mac) and dvd::rip (Linux).

I almost gave up on dvd::rip when I first set it up.  It has a cluster mode, and I naturally assumed that my Pentium-4 2.4GHz-HT clustered with my dual-Opteron server would make mincemeat of my DVDs (figuratively of course).  Unfortunately the Opteron is not strong on this sort of work (or perhaps the Gentoo ebuilds for the transcode package are not well optimised for AMD64), and the Pentium-4 was held back because it accessed the files over NFS.  That, combined with the fact that I had repeated errors and failed transcodes, drove me back to the Mac.

Not that that’s a bad thing.  Most of the software around is optimised for and benefits greatly from the Altivec engine.  Having a w00ty dual-G5 Power Mac is also a help   Mac the Ripper takes no time at all (well, okay, about 5 minutes) to rip a DVD — maybe a bit longer for a hefty DVD9 — although I do only rip the main feature to save a little time.  Then, using either Handbrake (for simple jobs) or ffmpegX (for better access to tweaking knobs) I make an AVI or MPG out of it.

There are two costs to all of this: 1) time, and 2) storage.

Time: this is actually a double-edged sword.  Not only does it take a sodding-long time to actually do the transcode (luckily you don’t have to sit by it) but I then have to transfer the file to the server, then light up XBMC and give it a test.  Not necessary to watch the whole thing (usually the first minute or so is enough to tell you how far out of sync the audio is).

Storage: I thought that editing Mini-DV and mastering that to DVD takes storage…  There is no way I will rip my whole DVD collection.  Apart from the fact that there are some movies that you just have to watch in original quality (oh, didn’t I mention that?  Yes, transcoding does require you to sacrifice some picture quality, although you do have a little control over just how much you do lose), I can’t justify putting more storage in the server just to watch the occasional movie.

So what will I use this for?  Some things are ideal — I can see the kids videos that get played on endless repeat being done this way.  Nicholas will be able to do it himself without us worrying about DVD drawers and smudges on discs (just have to make sure I can lock out the “educational videos” from his set   And, some things like the Bottom stage shows and episodes that we put on just for a laugh sometimes.  But not Matrix — not in MPEG4, anyways

Depending on the application it can be a pretty cheap way to get the power you need: I can get a brand-new console for A$244 retail (without going to a real discount shop, or I could brave the second-hand and private sale market and save even more) and then sell the controller on eBay for a few bucks — for that money, I get a Celeron/Pentium (reports vary) 733MHz with 64MB of RAM, a 8-10GB hard disk, built in 100MBps Ethernet, in a low-power moderately compact form-factor.

That’s right — the XBox is just a PC.  Sure, it has no keyboard or mouse, but it is made of standard PC components.  The only thing stopping anyone from running normal PC programs (such as Linux, or normal Windows) is the software protections that Microsoft designed into the XBox system to stop it — and it is these protections that XBox modding defeats.

There are quite a few people about building clusters of XBoxes for doing…  well, whatever someone who wants a cluster but can’t afford a real one would do with a cluster.

Anyway, back to my modding adventure.

Late in 2003, I was invited to present at the Darwin Linux User Group annual Install-Fest.  One of the presentations (not mine) was a cracker — basically, the presenter stopped at the local shopping centre on the way to the venue and bought a brand-new XBox, and proceeded to apply a software exploit and install Linux.  It was what I’d always wanted to do to the XBox I bought when I was working in Auckland, but never got around to.  Even after having seen it done, though, I didn’t get my finger out and do it myself.

The exploit that the presenter at DarLUG used is known as “MechInstaller”.  It was one of the early programs that exploited bugs in games.  The first game with an exploitable bug was “007: Agent Under Fire” by Electronic Arts, but soon afterwards Microsoft themselves released the game “Mech Assault” that contained a similar bug.  Basically, you “obtain” special files that look to the game like a “save-game” (a file containing saved progress through the game).  Instead of being real game progress data however, the file contains code that triggers the bug in the game and defeats the protection that Microsoft built into the XBox to prevent it from running unauthorised programs.

MechInstaller was the first exploit that I tried — but first I had to get a copy of the game.  Having heard that Microsoft had fixed the exploitable bug in later versions of the game, I figured that buying a “pre-played” copy of the game would increase my chances (and save me a few bucks on a game that I’d rarely play).  What I should have done is research if there was a way to determine if you had a patched copy of the game — because sure enough, I got home and found that the exploit didn’t work with my copy of MechAssault.  Boo hoo.  At this late stage I did the research and found that the DVD media of the original game had different identifying markings than the patched version, and what the markings were.

Susan joins the story at this point — she volunteered to go back to the game shop and play “Gamer’s Girlfriend” to try and get me the right version of the game.  Whatever she said to them worked, because she got it!  MechInstaller was GO, and before long I had a Linux system running on the XBox!

Now I had to choose which Linux to run.  Being a long time Gentoo user I was interested in Gentoo or Gentoox (a customised Gentoo specifically for XBox), but Xebian (or Ed’s Debian) has the best and longest track record in the XBox Linux scene so I pulled down the CD and went for it.  Before long I was booting the CD, installing, and rebooting off a real Linux system on the XBox.

Now what?  It was always my intention to use Linux on the XBox for media streaming.  Xebian comes with the Freevo package already installed, but I didn’t see that it would really suit the task.  I found the XBMP and XBMC projects (XBMC the descendant of the first, XBMP) which looked very attractive.  There was also a XBMC competitor that looked like a customised Gentoox build running MythTV, but again it did not seem to be exactly what I needed.  So, XBMC it was.

The folks that maintain XBMC do not build binaries of it.  Legally, XBMC can only be built using the Microsoft XDK — which is well beyond my price reach and far beyond the budget of this project (from what I understand the XDK is one of these “if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it” things).  A project to build a Free DK for the XBox, but XBMC will not build cleanly this way.  So how can you get it?  I cannot say — but if you poke around places like XBox-Linux and XBox-Scene for long enough you will find out.

Having found a way to get XBMC, I had to install it.  This is where things got interesting…  The MechInstaller was good only to perform a very basic modification to the XBox Dashboard (the program that provides the funky green blobby control panel on the XBox when it’s not running a game) that allows you to boot Linux.  Using MechInstaller, you always had to first boot up the XBox to the Dashboard, then select the “Linux” option that appeared, in order to run Linux.  Booting automatically to Linux, or running some other program (like XBMC) from the Dashboard, did not seem to be possible.  I started to face the possibility that the only way to proceed would be to replace the BIOS in my XBox with a BIOS that would allow other programs to run.  I set the project aside for a little while (during Christmas and New Year) while I contemplated doing possibly irreperable damage to my XBox…

When I came back to the XBox, I stumbled onto a new breed of software exploits: the UBE, and its descendant the UXE.  The original exploits like MechInstaller had a flaw — they were a two-part exploit.  The main bug they exploited was the buffer-overrun exposure in the game, but they also needed a gap in the way the Dashboard operates to make the needed Dashboard change.  Microsoft was busily patching this up, using updates to the XBox kernel and Dashboard in later builds of the XBox, but also using the “XBox Live” service to update the software on XBoxes without warning or permission from owners.  Some games also had updates to the XBox software, that were automatically applied when the game ran.  Consequently, by the very latest versions of the XBox software it was getting very difficult to use the existing exploits.

Then came the UBE.  While it still relied on a game with the exploitable bug, the trick it did on the XBox was different.  I don’t know the details, but apparently by the time the second version of the UBE was released (called UBE2) only the very latest PAL XBoxes could not be modded out-of-the-box — and even those could be done with a small and reversible change before running the exploit.  The UXE takes this even a step further — apparently any XBox can be modded.  There is a utility called ltools that you can use to install an exploit (now it provides UXE) and install one of a variety of alternative Dashboards which run at bootup instead of the Microsoft one.

UXE provided my answer to running XBMC.  I used MechInstaller’s Emergency Linux system to get the ltools files over the network to the XBOX, then I used the MechInstaller to restore the previous Dashboard (probably didn’t have to do this, but figured that the ltools installer might not handle a box that already had an exploit installed).  Then, I started MechAssault and loaded the ltools savegame.  What appears is one of the available alternative Dashboards for the XBox, and by pressing a couple of buttons I got the ltools installation script.  When it was time to run, a mini Linux system booted and did the work: first, it made a compressed copy of the XBox C: partition, then it did its real work (copying or modifying files, etc).  When I restarted, the XBox booted into my chosen Dashboard (MXM).

After that I installed XBMC by copying the files over the network using MXM’s built-in FTP service.  After selecting “Reset Menu Cache” in MXM and rebooting, XBMC was available in a new Applications menu of MXM.  My fun with XBMC was about to start!

About the only thing I’d like to do now is make the XBox boot up to XBMC.  Running via MXM only adds two button presses to the startup sequence, but if I’m going to be running XBMC all the time I might as well boot straight there (and if I need to run the M$ Dashboard or MXM I can do so from XBMC).

XBox Media Centre requires a modded XBox to operate, though as I found out a software-mod-only XBox is fine (given the apparent illegality of mod-chipping in Australia).  See another post for more info about how I modded.

XBMC lets me play my library of MP3s, listen to Internet Radio, watch movies (including ripped DVDs, apparently), and (perhaps most importantly to us right now) browse our digital photo gallery — all using the XBox DVD remote.  It comes with its own streaming protocol server, which appears not to stream as such but rather just serve files, but does run on Linux (an ebuild for Gentoo was all ready to go).  The interface is via TV, which makes sense for viewing movies and pictures but not so much for audio (of course you can turn the telly off once you’ve made your selection, or buy/build one of the LCD screen modules that XBMC knows how to address).  For the truly keen there is a web server built into XBMC as well, that lets you control some functions from a browser (it worked alright with IE, but Safari on our Power Mac gave it trouble, and there are reports of unfriendliness with Firefox).

Cost-wise, XBMC has really only cost me an XBox (yes, I already had one, but unfortunately for one who said that he only ever bought an XBox in order to run Linux I’ve built a bit of a game collection, and until only very recently I believed that the only way I could run Linux or XBMC from bootup was to replace the XBox BIOS, an operation that would have rendered the XBox unable to play games.  So I bought a new XBox for playing games, and modded the existing one.  Then I found out that I didn’t need to replace the BIOS…  Sigh…).  I also bought the “Advanced AV Pack”(?), the little output box that gives you S-Video and optical audio output from the XBox.  XBMC knows how to handle the digital output, and generates a superb-sounding AC-3 stream to our Yamaha amplifier (I never thought 128kbps MP3 could sound so good).

So is XBMC the “way to go”?  Well, I’ll let you know.  I’m happy so far — except for the freezes that have happened a few times, and the extraordinary amount of noise that comes out of the thing to keep the heat down (heat being a possible cause of the lockups, because I had not turned on a setting in XBMC that instructs it to increase the fan speed in response to rising temperature).  I’ve yet to try a DVD in it yet, and the promised visualisations do not appear when playing music…  Its competition is media streaming boxes like the Netgear MP-101 (which only does audio, has no digital output and requires proprietary Windows-only server software), the D-Link Media Gateway (?) (which does video and pictures but again requires Windows-only server software), Pinnacle’s media box (similar to the D-Link), and the SqueezeBox (great design, terrific software and community, but ghastly expensive by the time it lands in AU, with no video or picture capability).  For now I think I’ve made the right call.