LINUX ON THE IPHONE

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2008

Linux on the iPhone!
I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
– Serial driver
– Serial over USB driver
– Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don’t have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
– Wireless networking
– Touchscreen
– Sound
– Accelerometer
– Baseband support

The current userland we’re using, in the interest of expedience, is a Busybox installation created with buildroot, but glibc works fine as well, and we’re going to build a more permanent userland solution.

A demonstration video can be s [From Linux on the iPhone: Linux on the iPhone!]

Follow this link to the original post

Ulrich Drepper (udrepper) wrote, @ 2007-11-21 18:09:00 Entry tags: programming Memory and Cache Paper Well, it’s finally done. I’ve uploaded the PDF of the memory and cache paper to my home page. You can download it but do not re-publish it or make it available in any form to others. I do not want multiple copies flying around, at least not while I’m still intending to maintain the document. With Jonathan Corbet’s help the text should actually be readable. I had to change some of the text in the end to accommodate line breaks in the PDF. So I might have introduced problems, don’t think bad about Jonathan’s abilities. Aside, this is a large document. You simply go blind after a while, I know I do. Which brings me to the next point. Even though I intend to maintain the document, don’t expect me to do much in the near future. I’ve been working on it for far too long now and need a break. Integrating all the editing Jonathan produced plus today’s line breaking have given me the re [From udrepper: Memory and Cache Paper]

Hasselblad’s 39 megapixel H3DII-39MS DSLR brings the multi-shot:
Filed under: Digital Cameras

I have been a long timer Firefox user, since the really early days, but lately the memory bloat has just increased beyond what is comfortable. My browser is sometimes running for weeks at a time and it is not unnatural to see Firefox reach the 800MB mark even though I might only have 2 tabs open. The consequence of this is that the rest of my programs, xemacs mail iChat and Serendipity Blackmagic become unresponsive for a few seconds as I switch over to them. The worst part of the experience though is that Firefox will sometimes lock up all the tabs while it is trying to connect to some ad site or doing garbage collection.

I switched to Opera a week ago, and after a small transition period I am no really happy with it, It is always responsive, does not use much memory and has this most awesome feature called Speed dial.

Technorati Tags: firefox, opera, switch

We’ve won!:
Thanks to some inspired work by a few heroes, we’ve managed to work out how to get everything working again.

This is what we’ve found out: the hash at 0×58 is the one that matters. And we know how to generate it.

It’s a cryptographic signature combining data from the iTunesDB and a device specific identifier (called the firewireid) and some (formerly) secret numbers.

Instructions for linux users on how to fix their iTunesDB files are here. Windows users are going to have to wait a little while. (For interested programmers, the code to generate the hash is here.)

The heroes in question include wtbw, nopcode, teuf, simon and many others from #gtkpod.

Let’s all hope that (if they haven’t already from the iPhone unlocking) Apple learn that fighting against us is pointless. It’s a waste of their time if the open source crowd is going to get past it in just a weekend.

Technorati Tags: itunes, linux, iPod

Technorati Tags: linux

While I was in replacement mode I went ahead and purchased a new case. After a lot of research I settled on the Zalman HD160. It has a built in VFD 2 line display as well as an infra red receiver and it is all supported by Linux. Other parts used were an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, a Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT, Silent-Pipe II video card, a Seagate Barracuda 320GB hard disk, a Zalman CNSPS9500 CPU fan, and a Intel Core 2 DUO E6400 CPU.

Here is a picture of the final product (click on it for a full resolution version). This box it just amazingly fast and quiet as a mouse.

Here are some of the things required to make the remote and VFD display work on linux.

First you will need to download both the iIRTrans Server and the IRTrans lcdproc driver and install them as per the instructions. I installed mine in /usr/local/share

You will need to create a remote control definition for the one shipped with the HD160. You can either use the “IRTrans ASCII Client” to create your own or just download the one I created from the link below and copy it into /usr/local/share/irtrans/remotes

Zalman.rem

If you want the power button on the remote to turn the Zalman on/off you will need a switches.cfg. Here is mine for the Zalman remote

switches.cfg

This will also need to be copied into /usr/loca/share/irtrans/remotes

And here are some line I added to my rc.local to activate the 2 servers:


/usr/local/sbin/irserver -start_clock -daemon -logfile /var/log/irserver.log -pidfile /var/run/irserver.pid /dev/ttyUSB0
/usr/local/sbin/LCDd

Finally you will need to create an lircrc file for mythtv and copy it into ~mythtv/.mythtv. Click below to download mine.

lircrc

Enjoy.

UPDATE: 29 June 2007

A lot of people have asked how I got the power button on the remote to turn on the Zalman. Here are some quick instructions / screenshots.

I downloaded and installed the IRTrans windows software and then ran the IRTrans GUI client. You can probably run it under Wine if you do not have access to a windows computer. I ran mine under Parallels on my Apple MacBook Pro.

When the TCP/IP address box popped up, I put in the TCP/IP address of my mythtv box.
I then selected the device status menu.

In the device status windows under the Power ON section I entered the name of my remote as trained on my mythtv box ( in my case Zalman) and in the next text box I entered the name of the button that should power on the Zalman (in my case Power),

If you cannot remember the name of your remote or the name of the button, check /usr/local/share/irtrans/remotes on your mythtv box. You may also wish to add an entry to the PowerOFF section but I have left it blank.

If you are familiar with the command line, you can use the linux client. Here are some steps to follow:
Download and compile the IRTrans ascii client from http://www.irtrans.de/download/Client/client-src.zip

To compile, just unzip the source code into a directory, cd into that folder and then type in the following command:

gcc -o irclient *.c

To launch the ascii client:

./irclient localhost

1 - Send
2 - Learn
3 - Status

99 - Exit

go into the status menu by selecting 3

Select command 3
Getting Device Status ...SEND RES: 0 - 14

1 Device(s) Found:

0: - D5.03.08

99 - Exit

Select device 0
The device status should now be visible on screen

Select command 0
Device [0]: D5.03.08

Repeat Mask: x  o  o  o  o  o  o  x  x  x  o  o  o  o  o  o
0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15

Device Mode Send [20]: x
IR               [21]: x
SBUS             [22]: x
SBUS RemoteCtrl  [24]: x
RAW              [25]: o
SBUS send Repeat [27]: x

Self Repeat [36]: o

Learn Timeout   5ms [37]: o
Learn Timeout  15ms [38]: x
Learn Timeout  30ms [39]: o
Learn Timeout  60ms [40]: o
Learn Timeout  90ms [41]: o
Learn Timeout 120ms [42]: o
Learn Timeout 150ms [43]: o
Learn Timeout 250ms [44]: o

Repeat Timeout 5ms  [45]: x
Repeat Timeout 25ms [46]: o

PowerOn Remote               [52]: Zalman
PowerOn Command              [53]: Power

PowerOff Remote              [54]:
PowerOff Command             [55]:

Cancel                     [88]
Save & Exit                [99
]

Use option 52 and 53 to set the name of the remote for Power on as well as the name of the button for poweron.
Select Option 99 to save and exit.

Technorati Tags: hd160, linux, mythtv

Technorati Tags: linux, macosx

Needless to say, Adrian’s excitement rubbed off on me so I ordered 2 of them, one for work and one for home. At $AUD 159.00 each they are simply a steal. Two hours later, the NSLU2 at work was on the network serving files from a 200 GB disk. Samba and nfs were used serve files out to Linux, Mac OS X, Irix , Solaris and Windows computers. Apart from that I am also able to ssh into it and use it as any regular Linux computer.

The picture above shows the NSLU2 in the rack sandwiched between a Maxtor drive (which is plugged into it) on he left and a Sony DDS4 tape drive + SCSI disk on the right. The 2 green things in front of it are USB dongles and 2 DDS4 tapes are visible in front of the black SCSI disk. The unit is unbelievably tiny.

A big thank you goes out to the guys at the Unslung project. This is definitely the coolest Linux computer I have owned. Can’t wait to get home and set one up as an iTunes server for my 2 macs.

Update, 28 June 2005: The home NSLU2 is all configured. It is a dns, nfs, syslog, ntp and itunes server for my home network as well as an ssh server providing access to my network while I am on the road. Since its gone live on the internet, a few people have tried to break in but the NSLU2 valiantly repelled all attacks.

Technorati Tags: hacking, linux