Category Archives: hardware

Home Audio Server

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Procrastinating real work, I documented my home audio server setup. I needed a cross-platform solution, and as a first step, I settled with MPD. The setup is only a few days old, and I may decide to change software eventually. But the current setup works under Gnome, Windows, Mac OS X and even on my Nokia 6233.

Home Audio Server

What may be missing is FM/DAB Radio and streaming of TV, but I’m not sure the little NSLU2 is up to it. We’ll see.

The writeup on how to do this is long, so I put it at a separate page:
http://josefsson.org/grisslan/audio.html

(This is a continuation of my series to document the devices that run my home, the first was the internet setup).

1 TeraByte

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The timing of an article about the Hitachi 1TB disk (linked via a slashdot post) and the disk situation on my home server was too good to be missed. Hence this.

dopio:~# df -h|tail -3
/dev/sda1             917G  200M  871G   1% /big
/dev/sdb1             276G  248G   14G  95% /data
/dev/sdc1             276G  264G     0 100% /backup
dopio:~#

Oh, and not to be missed: the PopSci explanation of Perpendicular technology.

OpenMoko first impressions

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The physical design is excellent. The screen quality is awesome.

I started by flashing pre-built images to get something working. I flashed a new kernel and rootfs. The basic functionality is there, but things tend to crash a lot.

Building the software locally took quite some time, maybe close to a day on my laptop. The build tree is 11GB large. That is huge. Updating the software to the latest version and re-building it is pretty fast though; around a few minutes.

With todays’ build, I was finally able to make a voice call. The openmoko-dialer seems quite solid. What is missing is the audio settings. I’m now using alsactl -f /etc/alsa/gsmhandset.state restore to put the audio in the right state. There was a lot of echo and noise during the call.

Playing MP3 works fine. I was worried about performance problems, but the GUI is still responsive, even while copying a ~50MB file onto the 512MB mini-SD card. I discovered that the external audio connector isn’t a standard audio contact, it is smaller. I need to go out and buy a converter to be able to plug the neo into my stereo. It would have been nice if this cable had been included.

I briefly tried bluetooth, and at least the low-level stuff seems to be present and working. There is no GUI to power up the bluetooth chip though.

OpenMoko Neo1973 order confirmed

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Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated with regard to the progress of your order at the OpenMoko online store (http://direct.openmoko.com/).

Your credit card has now been charged by the following amount:

Subtotal: $450 USD
Shipping: $88.98 USD
Total: $538.98 USD

Please note that this amount might be less than what was originally mentioned in the webshop, since we meanwhile got better shipping rates!

This means that we will now send out your order ASAP.

You will receive another status update once the order has been sent out.

Linksys WRT54G3G + Huawei E600 + OpenWRT Kamikaze = Internet at summer house

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Spending vacation at the summer house without Internet connectivity? Unthinkable.

Linksys WRT54G3GHuawei E600

The first few days, I connected the laptop to my cell phone using Bluetooth, and then to the Internet using 3G/UMTS.

However, we have more than one laptop here, and the range of bluetooth is limited. I ended up setting up a wireless access point with a PCMCIA slot for a 3G/UMTS card. It has worked flawlessly for several days.

The writeup on how to do this is long, so I put it at a separate page:
http://josefsson.org/openwrt/internet.html

Update: I have written a similar howto for OpenWRT 8.09 and Huawei E220, see http://josefsson.org/openwrt/dongle.html