Log from #neuros IRC channel

<crweb>

thats a totally different market

<suma>

you mean 600 dollars ?

<crweb>

yes

<suma>

but with 229 i cannot get it under anyway right ?

<crweb>

it has a 8 spu cpu

<crweb>

the ps3 is a pc

[05:33]

<crweb>

High power use, no recording

<suma>

oo, it can also record !

<crweb>

?

<suma>

ps3

<crweb>

theres no video input, how could it record?

<suma>

usb

<suma>

no video input !

<crweb>

in that case, so can my pc?

<suma>

yes

<crweb>

why by a ps3 to do what my pc does?

<suma>

h.264 cannot be done in all pcs

<crweb>

umm

<suma>

it needs high power

<crweb>

i think you're a little miss informed there

[05:36]

<suma>

about >

[05:36]

<crweb>

h.264

<crweb>

HD-DVD, and Blue ray both are h.264 devices

<crweb>

and both are in pc's

<suma>

can you pls explain ...

<suma>

mmmm ...

<suma>

mean the devices the decode and encode for you ?

<crweb>

it doesn't tak that much power

<crweb>

what?

[05:38]

<crweb>

the video on HD-DVD, and Blue ray discs is h.264

[05:38]

<suma>

they are just storage medium right ?

[05:38]

<crweb>

yes

<suma>

the decoding and encoding is done at the host processor right ?

<crweb>

there are even handheld h.264

<crweb>

yes

<crweb>

they are just discs with h.264 files on them

<suma>

yes

<suma>

ps3 is capable of encoding and decoding h.264 right ?

<crweb>

a p3-800mhz would be capable

<suma>

or only decoding ? and no encoding ?

<crweb>

theres nothing stopping any encoding

<crweb>

you can encode on a 33mhz if you want

<suma>

i mean realtime !

<suma>

no offline

[05:41]

<suma>

neuros is very compact design, that is really need to appreciated

[05:42]

<suma>

functionality wise need to take long path

[05:42]

<crweb>

the OSD can encode/decode full h.264 video at 20fps

[05:42]

<crweb>

thats a 200mhz arm cpu

<crweb>

and a 120mhz dsp

<crweb>

depending on the quality you use, any pc can record in h.264 in real time.

<crweb>

but highqualy i'd say you'd probably need atleast a 2.4ghz

<crweb>

in your pC

<suma>

i c

[05:44]

<suma>

is there is any terms to define processor capabilities ?

[05:44]

<crweb>

what do you mean?

[05:44]

<suma>

say how much weight you can lift ? - 100 kg max

<suma>

like that, what is the terms to define processor capabilities >

<suma>

flops >

<suma>

?

<crweb>

there isn't a constant

<crweb>

every archetecture has different capabilities

<suma>

i c

<crweb>

even mhz/ghz is measured differently

<suma>

yes, i can see that

<crweb>

a 300mhz ppc, is equiv to about a 700mhz p3

[05:47]

<crweb>

which is the last comparison I actually did

[05:47]

<crweb>

depends on your task

[05:47]

<suma>

i c

<crweb>

neuros devices are based on embedded chips

<crweb>

they have specific purposes.

<suma>

can do multiple tasks in one cycle ?

<crweb>

the TiVo only has a 33mhz arm cpu

[05:49]

<suma>

i c

[05:49]

<suma>

that is something interesting to me

[05:49]

<suma>

i worked mostly on the software side, did not move into hardware capabilities

[06:02]

<suma>

crweb: will the iMX toolchain or libraries will work with the OSD ?

[06:03]

<crweb>

i don't know what that is, sorry

[06:04]

<suma>

iMX is a DSP processor from freescale

[10:58]

hi all

[11:00]

<American-Tech>

hi

[11:01]

hey folks, is there supposed to be a meeting today ?

[11:02]

supposed to, but I didn't get a chance to talk to gao about it, i guess he's not here, and I overslept

[11:03]

oh well, we'll have it another time them

[11:03]

then

[11:03]

JoeyBorn: was CES succesful, by the way ? any interesting news from there ?

[11:04]

yea, I'd say CES was successful, we had good meetings, etc

[11:05]

we got the innovation award honoree too, FWIW, so that was nice

[11:05]

like "most innovative product of show" kind of award ?

[11:06]

well it's mostly just for design.

[11:07]

well, nice anyway

[11:12]

so crweb said I missed what's basically a resolution on the build issues?

[11:12]

any other logs I need to go back and review?

[11:13]

actually i'm not sure what he was talking about. there was some talk in mailing list about that, but i don't think there was a definite resolution

[11:13]

you really need to ask him what he meant

[11:13]

well, he said to look at the logs from tues.

[11:14]

did you ?

[11:16]

looking now

[11:21]

Good (whichever morning/afternoon/evening/night it is where you are), everyone

[11:24]

morning derobert !

[11:24]

looks like discussion was at the end of open.neurostechnology.com

[11:25]

JoeyBorn: yeah, that looks like the last time I showed up

[11:30]

holy smokes, it looks like the bulk of that discussion was focused on that.

[11:41]

<American-Tech>

Trying to playing catch up from doing so little in the week..

[11:41]

wow, reading this discussion is really slow going, especially without any coffee

lol

JoeyBorn: which country are you in today?

Chicago :)

is that a country?

[11:43]

JoeyBorn: no, but if you traveled to Texas, that might be :-D

[11:43]

JoeyBorn: Chicago is just a type of pizza

here's something I particuliarly don't understand:

how many packages do people want to run on the OSD that needs to run its own code during the build process?

[22:33] <crweb> eigma: most

[22:33] <eigma> examples

[22:33] <crweb> eigma: samba, apache, java

from Jan 7 log

[11:52]

I'm just not really clear on what that means "run it's own code during the build process"

[11:56]

JoeyBorn: ummm

[11:57]

(it would be helpful if crweb had specific example of what samba or apache was building and then needing to execute to continue with the build)

[11:57]

sourcerror: autoconf

[11:57]

JoeyBorn: basically, a lot of programs will wonder "hey, does this system have feature FOO?"

[11:59]

JoeyBorn: and to find out, autoconf builds a program to test FOO and then runs it

[12:00]

derobert: but when does it need to run it? isn't the test whether it can build it?

sourcerror: depends on the test

ok

sourcerror: it runs it when you run the ./configure script

sourcerror: well, without the "./" of course ;)

[12:02]

autoconf is a part of that program or of the system?

[12:03]

JoeyBorn: part of that program

[12:03]

JoeyBorn: (well, actually, it's a seperate program... but the ./configure script you run is part of the program you're building)

[12:07]

ok, well appoligize for my ignorance, but AFAIK, there are three ways to "get a program running on your system"

[12:07]

1. it's precompiled to run on your "distro" right?

[12:07]

2. I guess you have to compile it yourself

and 3. we do it all for you and you get this honking upk (as the user)

so what you're really talking about is for #2 right?

is that the significance of this?

yep, #2

[12:10]

ok, so that's what we're trying to enable? easier downloading and compiling of 3rd party applications?

[12:11]

allowing people to compile their applications for the osd

[12:11]

withouth having to go through hell to do that

[12:15]

I see, but that's still going to require cross compiling, right?

[12:16]

given that the host is too slow, right?

[12:16]

yep

[12:22]

if I could rephrase what nerochiaro wrote: you'd like to partition the build environment so the bulk of the app compiling (non kernel, core stuff) doesn't make you have to build the earlier constant steps (kernel, core stuff). But where do you draw the line?

[12:22]

lights are starting to go on

[12:23]

sourcerror: it was crweb who said that, i think

[12:24]

er, yea.

[12:29]

It also seems to me there are different options after that related to packaging it up. Do you usually want to then package up your own .upk. Or do you mostly just run these user apps off of external storage?

[12:30]

generally packaging your own upks is needed if you change most of the system. for additional apps you can just run them out of storage (with or without using unionfs)

[12:31]

sounds right to me.

[13:08]

wow, I picked the wrong morning to quit drinking coffee, I'm following your one legged caffeine approach, nerochiaro

[13:09]

JoeyBorn: you mean, you decided to move to tea ?

[13:10]

well, move away from coffee really.

[13:11]

I've always been a tea drinker in the afternoon

[13:11]

oh i see. you just removed a leg

[13:12]

exactly :)

[13:12]

ok, well I feel like a snake that just swallowed a dog or something and will have to sit for a week for it to digest.

[13:13]

I've got notes like "busybox- unix utils, scratchbox- build environment" :)

[13:14]

you're on the right way with these notes

[13:14]

well anyway, I think I get the basic idea, and I have a number of questions on how this will work from a high level perspective.

[13:14]

* nerochiaro passes some digestive liquor to JoeyBorn "for the dog you just swallowed, sir"

[13:15]

thanks

[13:15]

so, let's take asterisk as an example, speaking of which derobert you still around?

[13:16]

so had we had this scratchbox environment in place, which as a side note I guess is really meant to work with debian based distributions...

[13:17]

then he would have compiled asterisk in scratchbox and that would have made things a lot easier, which is great, but then at the end of that process, does he have some binary that he can distribute or

yes, at the end of build there are binaries that everyone can use

does this have anything to do with a package manager system or is that something entirely different

and what does this "use" process entail at this point?

no, it doesn't. it's purely about going from source to binary. that is, building stuff

that answer was about "does it have to do with package manager"

I see, so implementing some kind of yum or rpm thing is entirely different subject?

yes

I see, ok then what about creating a upk?

[13:20]

and upk is an image of a full system to be loaded on the OSD. what would it matter in this case ?

[13:20]

how do you go from working binary --> upk you can distribute, is my question

[13:20]

since gao presumably will have to do that, at least for the most generally useful applications

[13:21]

gao can add binaries to the upk he makes

[13:21]

but that's not necessary. we can use binaries even without putting them into the upk

[13:22]

with an upk, you're basically reinstalling the whole system, and you don't want to do that everytime you want to add a new program (binary)

[13:23]

it would be like reinstalling your whole fedora when you need to install a new text editor, for example

[13:27]

yea, I got that, but I'm just trying to understand the details of the steps

[13:28]

for example, having tried to install various software (and you've seen me flail around with this firsthand) I know that there are issues just with that alone, dependencies, etc

[13:29]

if someone has gotten the application to work on the OSD, they have often gone through a number of steps an while those may seem obvious and simple to them, it may not be so to the xiamen team

[13:29]

thus I'm wondering how many of those steps are preserved by having this binary, does that make sense?

[13:31]

generally the hard part is building the application for the OSD. once the build is done and you have a binary (or more) then it's generally just a matter of putting them in the right place on the OSD file system (you can call this step "installing", in a sense). once that is done, one just rebuilds the upk (which contains inside the whole OSD file system)

[13:34]

so if someone has "gotten an app to work on the OSD", generally it means they have manage to build it and are able to provide (at least) binaries that should be trivially easy to include into an upk, if xiamen wants to

[13:35]

well, ok, I guess it seems to me that it depends on how you define "user" but generally, it seems to me that most of the "user" level functionality (user defined as someone buying the device as a recorder at retail)

[13:36]

will require a GUI which xiamen (or someone) will have to integrate anyway.

[13:36]

take the samba tools, in practice, there wasn't a great deal of utility to the user (as defined above) until xiamen included it in a gui...

[13:37]

but I certainly understand the point of sb for the kind of "super user" we'll call them...

[13:38]

oh no, that's because you seem to share the "osdmain is the only app that should be running on the osd" kind of stance. there are other apps that have their own interface and that should not require integration by your team. for example someone might write an xmms2-based audio player that runs independently of osdmain

[13:39]

there is no need to "integrate" that

[13:39]

at least no need to integrate it into osdmain (as the samba example you mentioned)

[13:40]

however, once again, you are still missing the point

[13:40]

since scratchbox is a tool for building stuff, which is a thing that no "user" would ever do

[13:41]

as you mentioned before, there are several steps to "get something working on the osd", and the first one is to build it. this is not a step an "user" is supposed to do, it is always done for him by whoever manages the system (be neuros or a 3rd party)

[13:43]

now, i know you had some experience in "installing stuff" on linux that led you to the need of building software, but that's not generally what is expected from a "user"

[13:43]

most of the time, even on linux, you just use pre-built binaries

[13:46]

nerochiaro: sorry looks like my connection glitched if you wrote anything to me from :33 to :42 I didn't see it

[13:47]

I see, no I don't feel that everything should be in osdmain, I'd be delighted if there were indep. 3rd party apps I guess my point is that it seems that a lot of stuff that folks are porting has no GUI and thus frequently isn't useful for the average person.

[13:48]

I suppose there are exceptions, for example, I would like to use my OSD as a NAS, adn that might not require a GUI on the device

[13:48]

actually crweb says he has that going, but I don't know how to use it.

[13:49]

JoeyBorn: well i don't know about that NAS thing specifically, but in general there are indeed other apps that you don't need to integrate (in osdmain)

[13:49]

sourcerror: no, i did not

[13:50]

fair enough, it's moot since I'm all for stuff outside of OSDmain anyway...

[13:52]

ok, so back to the building/installing questions. did that clarify some bits ? still have hazy areas ?

[13:52]

nerochiaro, but let me get back to something you just said, that there generally is no need to "build software" so I guess you are imagining that someone with an interest in the OSD would compile something (presumably using sb) for the OSD and then distribute the binaries to other OSD users?

[13:52]

then (hopefully) the installation process would be pretty simple?

[13:53]

and so that's what was meant by the how to distribute such applications discussion that occured on the ML in regards to the asterisk thing?

[13:54]

JoeyBorn: yes. that is how things should work for the "user". right now it's already pretty simple to "install" a binary and use it on the osd (using for example a media card and unionfs). in regards to askerisk, i have not followed that discussion much, so i'm not sure

[13:55]

but if there's an askerisk binary and all that is needed is to run it, then i don't see the issue.

[13:56]

(or better put, i see some issues, but not related to this "installing" thing)

[13:59]

that discussion was more about "is there a central place on the web to talk about such things?"

JoeyBorn: what things exactly ?

3rd party applications.

ah, then "no" is the answer

how do I do Ctrl-C from the OSD gui console in 3.27-0.54 :)

[14:09]

sourcerror: you don't, probably

[14:09]

doh!

[14:09]

sourcerror: what do you need that for ?

I'm new at this, just booted my OSD last night...

I realized the OSD didn't respond to PING, so I did ping from the OSD console and now cannot ctrl-c :)

I guess we really should create a 3rd party place though

to help promote stuff like that

sourcerror: heh, i see. no idea on how to do that

JoeyBorn: right, but that is not easy to do right

is there no telnet or sshd in latest .upk?

telnetd

sourcerror: telnet should be always there

telnetd, i mean

nerochiaro, why is that hard (creating a place for 3rd party apps?)

[14:12]

hmm. I don't have a gender changer around so can't do serial at the moment. I thought I could telnet over ethernet. should that work?

JoeyBorn: it is hard to do that well. if you just want people to dump their apps in a place along with a couple lines of description, it's easy. but keeping a repository of 3rd part apps (and hopefully packages when we will have a pkg management system) with versioning etc. is not trivial

you could host them like they do with yum repositories right? it would also be nice if neuros could digitally sign them and people could avoid binaries not signed by neuros if the like.

sourcerror: sure it will work (telnet over eth)

nerochiaro: standard port?

sourcerror: that's why i said it wasn't going to be easy to do that "well"

[14:14]

sourcerror: yes, standard

[14:14]

nerochiaro, ahh gotcha

[14:22]

nerochiaro: should I be able to ping the OSD? It has an IP (from DHCP) on my subnet but I cannot telnet to it over eth

[14:23]

actually telnet on host says "no route to host"... hmm

[14:25]

sourcerror: pings are ok here

[14:35]

cool, I just telnetted into my OSD, btw, I can ping too.

[14:36]

I didn't realize I could do that.

nerochiaro: argh. Yea! It worked from my windows machine. ( I recently installed fedora core6 and maybe the firewall is fubar. I didn't want to spend today messing with my fedora firewall)

crweb, you around?

thanks.

how about an ftp server, anyone tried to install that on the OSD?

[14:41]

I'm just getting started. I need to set up the dev environment that you are all talking about :)

[14:43]

well, welcome aboard anyhow, sourcerror !

[14:44]

thanks.

[15:09]

<crweb>

I am here now

[15:11]

<crweb>

sourcerror: i ping all the time

[15:23]

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: sounds like you get some of the gist of the discussion

[15:25]

<crweb>

my main arguement was don't put the base system build into the user development env. It would be bad for neuros, and bad for developers who aren't dev'ing for base system.

[15:25]

<crweb>

which is neuros-bsp

[15:25]

<crweb>

nerochiaro: mgao liked my idea for the rootfs and we compromized out what is probably a good solution

[15:28]

<crweb>

suma, I don't know if iMX does or does not work on the OSD, if iMX works on the Ti-DM320 cpu, then it should. but every DSP is different

[15:31]

what's your idea for the rootfs?

[15:31]

JoeyBorn: random question: how do you say "no" in Chinese...?

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: most of my work is in the internals of neuros-bsp/* ( where most developers won't be touching and those that do know how to build things)

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: right now the build system "generates" on the fly the rootfs

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: so to add a file to the rootfs you have to hack all the make file system

derobert, you don't really say "no" as you do in english, it depends on question typically

for example if someone asks you "do you want this?" you would answer "don't want" not no.

Ah, ok

Guess I can't add that to my list of ways to say "no" in tons of languages...

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: I proposed to have a "base" rootfs directory structure, and instead of adding files to make, you copy them into base/* and when you "make rootfs" first it copies the base, then generates the stuff that has to be generated.

[15:34]

<crweb>

so base/* would contain a full file system with all the "constant stuff"

[15:36]

<crweb>

derobert: getting rid of some of that bsp hell :)

[15:36]

crweb: yeah

[15:36]

* derobert isn't really paying attention....

[15:37]

<crweb>

so either this isn't the 13th, I was looking at the wrong timezone, or there was no meeting at 17:00UTC?

[15:40]

on some forms, Ive seen ?written which basically seems to take the place of no, but I don't really know exactly how it's used, and clearly it's not common in conversational.

[15:41]

crweb, there was no meeting per se. I didn't get in contact with Gao soon enough I guess.

[15:41]

<crweb>

JoeyBorn: he came in the other night and we talked about the samba/windows XP issue

well the actual meeting was thurs night, but I was flying back from CES>

<crweb>

ah

anyway, crweb, what do I need to do to get samba sharing working on the OSD?

also, something you'd probably know, what do I need to do to get an ftp server working on the OSD?

<crweb>

well, at this current moment, I'm working on getting the osd to find xp shares.

<crweb>

ftp, is going to take a small ftp client to be compiled.

<crweb>

let me see if i have something thandy

<crweb>

err, handy even