bobpeers -> blog

I just installed the Moblin beta refresh created on 07-06-2009 and just for interest tried the update software setting. I was rather surprised that there were already 270 updates totalling 279MB (this was only 11 days after the release).

My point is that it’s clear that there’s some very heavy development going on right now even though it’s already a very stable and feature rich OS.

It also highlights one of the great features about open source software, everyone gets the opportunity to see the progress and comment on it. It may be more exciting the way Apple, for example, releases it’s next versions but I can’t help think in the long run it’s better to be open.

Since my last post I’ve downloaded the Moblin v2.0 beta img file and installed the img using Virtualbox. It’s easy to install, just use the img file as you would a regular iso file so set Virtualbox to boot from the img file.

The only gotcha is to remember to enable PAE/NX in the general settings, I seem to forget this every time but the boot process stops early on with the warning. I’m also not sure how much space is required for the install but at my first attempts failed with the partitioner complaining that you must have at least 2500 MB for the root (/) partition, I’d say to allow at least 4GB in total.

For anyone that’s used Fedora and the Anaconda installer before it’s all very familiar stuff except for a few removed options (no encrypted partitions for example). The install took about 10 minutes at most.

Once rebooted we arrive at the start page, or m_zone as moblin call it.

I’ll not go into much detail as it’s described thoroughly on the Phoronix site and Ars Technica but here’s a few screen shots of the applications screen, nautilus and a terminal (no it’s not hidden away!).

Many applications are standard Gnome versions but with a modified theme and I think the GUI is very easy to use even to some one totally new to the interface.

Just to note that there seems to be no GUI to shutdown Moblin, instead open a terminal and use:

sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

The user you created on install is added to the sudoers file so you can run this command by using your normal users password.

Generally it runs OK in Virtualbox, if very slowly, plus there are some issues with the screen resolution as you can see in the screen shots that the top menu becomes ‘squashed’ at the right side and the start screen actually goes of the edge of the screen.

Nautilus

Applications Display

Terminal

I just read that Intel has released a beta version of the Moblin OS for netbooks. This replaces XFCE used on the alpha release with the new Intel interface. I’ve yet to give it a try but I’ll post some screen shots when it’s running in VirtualBox.

Update – I’ve just realised that there are no VMWare images available for the beta as there were for the alpha, not a big deal but a bit more work to get going.

After my experiences with Google Android I decided to take Intels Moblin for a spin. Intel make it very easy to try Moblin out as they already provide a VMWare image on the main download page.

As it turns out using VMWare images in Virtualbox is a piece of cake as Virtualbox natively supports this format. Simply download the image from the website, then unpack the file (if you’re using Windows I highly recommend using 7-Zip, plus it’s GPL licensed) and save the vmdk file into your Virtualbox harddisks folder.

In Virtualbox you just use the vmdk file as as the new machines hard disk and off you go. I found Moblin booted very quickly and connected to the network without any problem. The desktop environment used is XFCE so you would expect good performance but in use I found it was extremely sluggish. Some mouse clicks took 20-30 seconds to register and I noted that the CPU used by Virtualbox hung at around 50% during this whole period. I suspect that this is a problem with Virtualbox and not Moblin but it’s hard to be sure.

Moblin is aimed mainly at the rapidly expanding netbook marked which Android may also be venturing into. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future in this field, especially with Windows 7 fighting over the same market (if Microsoft can maintain it’s profit margins that is).

I’ve been reading plenty about the Microsoft case against Tom Tom recently. Essentially Microsoft is suing Tom Tom over claims that their in car GPS systems infringe on some of Microsofts patents.

As a couple of sites have pointed out it seems that Tom Tom is being forced into a corner whereby they either pay up to Microsoft and in the process open themselves up to being sued for infringement of the GPL license or drop Linux and be forced to use Microsoft embedded systems in future.

Either way it’s a loose-loose situation for Tom Tom, even if standing up to Microsoft instead of paying up and signing their Non-disclosure agreement is the right thing to do.

It does seems that with Linux on netbooks, smartphones (and maybe netbooks) using Google Android and thePalm Pre Microsoft is feeling the pressure.

Of course many have pointed out that if Microsoft enforces patents on the FAT file system one of the consequences may be that device manufacturers will move over to a GPL licensed system like ext2 instead. Oh the irony!

It’s been pretty up and down but I’ve successfully compiled Google Andriod for an eee701. The problem is that after converting the installer.img into a VDI file and booting in Virtualbox I’m stuck at the boot menu.

I’ve actually been compiling the source in a Virtual environment, a Fedora 10 virtual machine running on Windows XP Professional.

In brief here’s the procedure so far on Fedora 10.

1. Install the Sun Java SE Development Kit (JDK)
2. Edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following lines.

   export JAVA_HOME='/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_12'
   PATH=.:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin:$PATH
   

3. Install gperf.

   # yum install gperf

4. Make sure you have a ~/bin directory in your home directory, and check to be sure that this bin directory is in your path:

   $ cd ~
   $ mkdir bin
   $ echo $PATH
   

5. Download the repo script and make sure it is executable:

   $ curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
   $ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
   

6. Create an empty directory to hold your working files:

   $ mkdir mydroid
   $ cd mydroid
   

7. Get the cupcake branch

   $ repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b cupcake

8. To pull down files to your working directory from the repositories as specified in the default manifest, run

   $ repo sync

9. I tried compiling with

   $ TARGET_ARCH=x86 TARGET_PRODUCT=eee_701 DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true make -j2 installer.img

   but this fails with the error:

   du: cannot access `out/target/product/eee_701/data': No such file or directory
   

   After making this data directory and running again the compiling is successful.

   File edit complete. Wrote 2 images.
   Done with bootable installer image -[ out/target/product/eee_701/installer.img ]
   

10. Change to the output directory

    $ cd out/target/product/eee_701/

11. Convert the installer.img to a Virtualbox VDI file

    $ VBoxManage  convertfromraw -static -format VDI ./installer.img  ./installer.vdi

12. Create a new virtual machine in Virtualbox and use this vdi as the hard drive.
13. Unfortunately this is where I get stuck. At first I received errors like:

    $  Booting `recovery`
    cmdline (hd0,1)/cmdline
    Error 15: File not found
    

    or

    Booting `std_boot`
    cmdline (hd0,2)/cmdline
    Error 22: No such partition
    

    Exactly as described here
    These problems were fixed by changing hd(0,2) to hd(0,0) but then it seems to boot only to be presented with this error. The same can be found in this post.

    init: Unable to open persistent property directory /data/property errno: 2
    sh: can’t access tty: Waiting for device /dev/block/sdb2
    

I can’t get past this error and the solutions on android-porting pages are sometimes hard to follow. Never the less I’ll keep trying especially that I’m so close.

Note that this was using the stock Andriod kernel. I also tried compiling the 2.6.27 kernel but it fails with the following error.

drivers/rtc/alarm.c:16:27: error: asm/mach/time.h: No such file or directory
drivers/rtc/alarm.c: In function ‘alarm_suspend’:
drivers/rtc/alarm.c:357: error: implicit declaration of function ‘save_time_delta’
make[2]: *** [drivers/rtc/alarm.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [drivers/rtc] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

Reading this post I see that this is a known issue and there is a patch but I haven’t tried applying the patch yet.

If you do decide to compile your own kernel it’s pretty easy.

$ cd ~/mydroid/vendor/asus/eee_701/
$ make menuconfig

Save the config file then.

$ make bzImage

Then copy the kernel to vendor/asus/eee_701

$ cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage ../vendor/asus/eee_701/kernel

Is seems that the format for getting shared folders to work with Linux clients has changed. Assuming I’m trying to mount the Windows Desktop in the Linux client I used to use the following command.

# mount -t vboxsf \\vboxsvr\Desktop /mnt/desktop

I tried this today and it fails with the error:

# /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error

It turns out that the way to get this working is to drop the server name and use a lowercase ‘D’.

# mount -t vboxsf desktop /mnt/desktop

After downloading and running the Google Andriod vdi for Virtualbox I decided to try and compile the source myself. I’m following the directions on the andriod-porting Google group including trying to enable networking that didn’t work in the vdi file I downloaded.

I’ve just finished downloading the cupcake source tree from git that takes quite a while as I’m not able to get more than about 1 to 2 Mbit/s when downloading. I’ve also modified the kernel config to include the ‘AMD PCnet32 PCI support’ that is one of the network devices supported by Virtualbox.

Next step is to compile but that’s for another post.

After reading this page about running Google Android in Virtualbox I thought it might be fun to have a go.

Just download the vdi file from the above site and create a new virtual machine. On booting I selected a video mode of 640x480x16 (use letter g) for best results. Note that you also have to enable the Serial Ports in Virtualbox otherwise it hangs at the grub menu. Apart from that it boots in a matter of seconds and looks really good.

Note that there’s no networking or mouse support right now but it’s still fun to play around with. Many thanks to the above site for sharing the vdi file for anyone to try.

I was reading Linux Format Magazine when I read a letter referring to Crunchbang Linux. It’s essentially a lightweight, repackaged Ubuntu distribution but with Openbox as the window manager. It seems to have quite a few fans already and is moving up the Distrowatch popularity board rapidly.

I downloaded the iso file tonight so tomorrow I’ll install it into Virtualbox to give it a spin.