Log from #neuros IRC channel

I've been actively recruiting hellwolf because (as you know) we desperately need folks that can bridge the gap between community and open source and the xiamen team

[05:06]

sorry, that was to nerochiaro

[05:07]

so I'm on a mission to find folks like hellwolf

[05:07]

hellwolf: you seem to speak pretty good english, contrary to other Chinese people i've met in here

[05:07]

and I believe that if we can recruit a couple like him, we can really spread the word about Neuros in China

[05:08]

JoeyBorn: oh, seems like a good idea i think

[05:08]

I would guess that you guys already talked a little about hellwolf's idea for the package manager?

[05:08]

nerochiaro, thanks. :D

[05:08]

JoeyBorn: no, not yet

[05:08]

JoeyBorn: and i think hellwolf is in dire need of a unit

[05:08]

yep, I already offered to send him one.

hellwolf: correct ?

ah, ok

great

he just needs to send me his address :D

[05:09]

nerochiaro, yes, I already have a pakcage build system and manager in my toolbox

[05:09]

which only tested on i386 and arm

[05:09]

well, I pointed him to the bounty blog from september, but after I did that I talked to Gao and realized all the challenges

[05:09]

hellwolf: is it based on ipkg ?

[05:10]

our rootcramfs is read only, etc.

[05:10]

Nope, I wrote it from scratch using perl.

[05:10]

I'm honestly not really clear how the package manager is supposed to work right now.

[05:10]

I like Gentoo-ish portage model

[05:11]

but still need binary package capability

[05:11]

<Ycros>

I like portage

[05:11]

hellwolf: ah, then we need to have perl interpreter running on the OSD, which we don't have now

[05:11]

<Ycros>

sort it's ports-like?

[05:11]

Ycros: portage is port-like

[05:11]

nerochiaro, build tool is in perl, but binary package model is light-weight

[05:12]

hellwolf: i'm not sure about this, but my gut feeling tells me perl is not a good idea on the OSD

[05:12]

I got ideas from the tool "stow"

[05:12]

<Ycros>

nerochiaro: yes, I know

[05:12]

<Ycros>

aha! gnu stow

[05:12]

<Ycros>

so you maintain symlink farms?

[05:13]

Build system is not on OSD, so OSD need no perl still

[05:13]

Yes symlink farms~

[05:14]

hellwolf: ok, tell me about the actual package installation then

[05:15]

the part that goes on the OSD

[05:17]

nerochiaro, I don't have much idea about OSD currently, sorry. I split things to these stages : %prep %build %install %crop, after these stages, I got a binary package, which has dependency info in it.

[05:18]

nerochiaro, I heard about that less than 1 week. Right? JoeyBorn

[05:19]

yes, it hasn't been very long :)

[05:19]

but I've spent a lot of time bothering you in that small period :)

[05:19]

Not exactly, I'm pretty interesting on it

[05:20]

hellwolf: ok, well, basically one of the problems is that we have a read only file system, but we can install files in the internal flash if we want, or installing them on external usb hard disk and use unionfs to make them appear as part of the root tree

[05:23]

nerochiaro, so the problems now is?

[05:23]

<Ycros>

nerochiaro: or symlinks, like the way stow does it

[05:23]

Ycros: yes, although symlinks have to be written into the main tree, which is read only

[05:24]

<Ycros>

good point

[05:24]

<Ycros>

:P

[05:26]

hellwolf: well, the missing pieces are 1) a program on the osd that you can use to install and uninstall packages 2) a sensible way to decide where these packages get installed (in flash, usb, media cards) 3) a central repository for ready-to-install binary packages (this last one is optional of course)

[05:26]

hi all

[05:26]

hellwolf: (but point 3 is the most important for the end-user experience)

[05:26]

yes, point 3 is pretty big

[05:27]

and don't forget a UI for browsing 3

[05:27]

hi daurnimator

[05:27]

hows life in X

[05:28]

nerochiaro, the package database also should be located in flash, usb or media card, am I right?

[05:31]

I think maybe I need to learn more about OSD. I even do not know it's hardware configuration :(

[05:32]

hellwolf, well, it's a reasonable question anyway.

[05:33]

hellwolf: yes, if that database is what is used to keep the metadata necessary to install/uninstall packages

[05:33]

hellwolf: i would keep that in flash, so we are sure we always have that available

[06:16]

ok, I'm off for a bit

[06:17]

cya

[06:45]

* nerochiaro leaves. later

[07:08]

<anders_>

Was there a youtube download script written for the osd?

[07:24]

theres my lua one

[08:00]

I've used it (daurn's script) and can testify that it works.

[08:01]

anders_, and I'm not asking this to pester, I'm just curious.

[08:01]

what's going on with the XMMS2?

[08:01]

the audio playing capabilities of the OSD, currently are um, well rudimentary to put it nicely.

[08:37]

<anders_>

JoeyBorn: I should put my patches up somewhere so other people interested can have a look at my xmms2-client-in-mainapp stuff.

[09:50]

anders_, cool, yeah, that'd be great.

[12:55]

<crweb>

new dev env released, www.limesg.com

[12:56]

crweb: check your spelling please ;)

[12:56]

<crweb>

yeah forgot about that

[12:57]

anyone knows a good flowcharting app for linux ?

[13:00]

nerochiaro: Depends on your qualification of "good". I think there's something in the kde family that does it

"decent" even

kivio is the name

thanks

<crweb>

i only found 1 spelling error..

[13:02]

<crweb>

ah

[13:02]

<crweb>

2

[13:02]

crweb: one in the link bar. and there's an error in the text

[13:03]

* chreekat offers his services as grammar nazi

[13:04]

crweb: "first download and install you need to go into the updates" << this doesn't make sense in the context. either add a period or splice the sentence somehow

[13:07]

<crweb>

damn kate wasn't syncing over sftp

[13:09]

<crweb>

nerochiaro: the way i figure it is, my actual ext2 filesystem on my drive is 22mb for osd rootfs, but the cramfs is 6mb

[13:09]

<crweb>

we might have a lot more space than we thought..

[13:09]

<crweb>

depending on compression ratio's

[13:10]

cramfs packs a lot

[13:11]

<crweb>

i almost fit all of qt4 and all of neuros stuff on the osd last night

[13:11]

<crweb>

i'm going to have to drop mysql support or postgresql support to get it to work

[13:12]

the VM is the dev environment, right?

[13:12]

<crweb>

yes

[13:13]

and the firmware tarball is what is to be hacked?

[13:14]

<crweb>

firmware tarball provides a booting, running system from nfs that exactly matches the official released firmware version

[13:15]

<crweb>

the whole point of it is that you don't need to build the entire svn repo, to have a system you can write/compile and run software from

[13:15]

<Fatal>

heh neat, one of the kivio guys are probably going to start working at the same place as me :D

[13:15]

<Fatal>

(and anders)

[13:16]

Fatal: i dropped off for a little. "(and anders)" << what did you say before ?

[13:16]

<Fatal>

"heh neat, one of the kivio guys are probably going to start working at the same place as me :D"

[13:16]

Fatal: where's that?

[13:17]

<Fatal>

Netintact, part of Procera Networks

[13:17]

ah cool

[13:20]

So then, is the firmware package the destination target for dev projects? E.g. is it what the xmms2 client would be compiled/linked to?

[13:36]

Also, the text still leaves me, the ignorant reader, unaware of how to use the firmware update

[13:40]

chreekat: you have a point

[13:40]

but inside the update there is probably a readme

[13:41]

chreekat: the firmware package contains all the pre-compiled neuros libraries that you need to link against

[13:41]

and a file system that you can network mount from your OSD

[13:41]

crweb: the firmware update includes the libraries, but what about the headers ?

[15:07]

crweb: you there ?

[15:27]

<crweb>

firmware updates are nothing but nfs booting

[15:27]

<crweb>

for now

[15:27]

<crweb>

I've got to modify scratchbox a little to include the headers

[15:36]

crweb: remember that cowon fb driver, did you say you actually managed to use it ?

[15:37]

<crweb>

no, i didn't have qt working at the time, and osdmain won't run with it because it has a different api

[15:38]

ah, so you never actually seen it working (not with osdmain, just seeing it loading and using it do display something) ?

[15:38]

<crweb>

no i didn't

[15:38]

<crweb>

but it works for the mrobe guys

[15:39]

<crweb>

which is exactly the same

[15:40]

ok

[15:40]

<crweb>

i got it form a guy using it

[15:40]

<crweb>

resolution might need to be modified

[02:44]	<JoeyBorn>	nerochiaro, you around?
[03:02]	<anders_>	Morning Joe
[03:03]	<daurnimator>	evening joe
[03:18]	<JoeyBorn>	hi guys.
[03:18]	<JoeyBorn>	hows it going?
[03:26]	<anders_>	Fine.. Except that I just realized that I bought the wrong type of memory for my SO's computer.
[03:27]	<anders_>	:)
[04:07]	<JoeyBorn>	hows XMMS going?
[05:03]	<JoeyBorn>	nerochiaro, still there?
[05:03]	<nerochiaro>	yep
[05:04]	<JoeyBorn>	hellwolf, you there?
[05:04]	<hellwolf>	ye
[05:04]	<JoeyBorn>	nerochiaro, I want to introduce you to hellwolf
[05:04]	<nerochiaro>	we talked briefly yesterday
[05:05]	<JoeyBorn>	hellwolf is a chinese hacker out of nanjing university, oh great
[05:05]	<JoeyBorn>	do you have any background?
[05:05]	<hellwolf>	Who?
[05:06]	<JoeyBorn>	I've been actively recruiting hellwolf because (as you know) we desperately need folks that can bridge the gap between community and open source and the xiamen team
[05:06]	<JoeyBorn>	sorry, that was to nerochiaro
[05:07]	<JoeyBorn>	so I'm on a mission to find folks like hellwolf
[05:07]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: you seem to speak pretty good english, contrary to other Chinese people i've met in here
[05:07]	<JoeyBorn>	and I believe that if we can recruit a couple like him, we can really spread the word about Neuros in China
[05:08]	<nerochiaro>	JoeyBorn: oh, seems like a good idea i think
[05:08]	<JoeyBorn>	I would guess that you guys already talked a little about hellwolf's idea for the package manager?
[05:08]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, thanks. :D
[05:08]	<nerochiaro>	JoeyBorn: no, not yet
[05:08]	<nerochiaro>	JoeyBorn: and i think hellwolf is in dire need of a unit
[05:08]	<JoeyBorn>	yep, I already offered to send him one.
[05:08]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: correct ?
[05:08]	<nerochiaro>	ah, ok
[05:09]	<nerochiaro>	great
[05:09]	<JoeyBorn>	he just needs to send me his address :D
[05:09]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, yes, I already have a pakcage build system and manager in my toolbox
[05:09]	<hellwolf>	which only tested on i386 and arm
[05:09]	<JoeyBorn>	well, I pointed him to the bounty blog from september, but after I did that I talked to Gao and realized all the challenges
[05:09]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: is it based on ipkg ?
[05:10]	<JoeyBorn>	our rootcramfs is read only, etc.
[05:10]	<hellwolf>	Nope, I wrote it from scratch using perl.
[05:10]	<JoeyBorn>	I'm honestly not really clear how the package manager is supposed to work right now.
[05:10]	<hellwolf>	I like Gentoo-ish portage model
[05:11]	<hellwolf>	but still need binary package capability
[05:11]	<Ycros>	I like portage
[05:11]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: ah, then we need to have perl interpreter running on the OSD, which we don't have now
[05:11]	<Ycros>	sort it's ports-like?
[05:11]	<nerochiaro>	Ycros: portage is port-like
[05:11]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, build tool is in perl, but binary package model is light-weight
[05:12]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: i'm not sure about this, but my gut feeling tells me perl is not a good idea on the OSD
[05:12]	<hellwolf>	I got ideas from the tool "stow"
[05:12]	<Ycros>	nerochiaro: yes, I know
[05:12]	<Ycros>	aha! gnu stow
[05:12]	<Ycros>	so you maintain symlink farms?
[05:13]	<hellwolf>	Build system is not on OSD, so OSD need no perl still
[05:13]	<hellwolf>	Yes symlink farms~
[05:14]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: ok, tell me about the actual package installation then
[05:15]	<nerochiaro>	the part that goes on the OSD
[05:17]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, I don't have much idea about OSD currently, sorry. I split things to these stages : %prep %build %install %crop, after these stages, I got a binary package, which has dependency info in it.
[05:18]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, I heard about that less than 1 week. Right? JoeyBorn
[05:19]	<JoeyBorn>	yes, it hasn't been very long :)
[05:19]	<JoeyBorn>	but I've spent a lot of time bothering you in that small period :)
[05:19]	<hellwolf>	Not exactly, I'm pretty interesting on it
[05:20]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: ok, well, basically one of the problems is that we have a read only file system, but we can install files in the internal flash if we want, or installing them on external usb hard disk and use unionfs to make them appear as part of the root tree
[05:23]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, so the problems now is?
[05:23]	<Ycros>	nerochiaro: or symlinks, like the way stow does it
[05:23]	<nerochiaro>	Ycros: yes, although symlinks have to be written into the main tree, which is read only
[05:24]	<Ycros>	good point
[05:24]	<Ycros>	:P
[05:26]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: well, the missing pieces are 1) a program on the osd that you can use to install and uninstall packages 2) a sensible way to decide where these packages get installed (in flash, usb, media cards) 3) a central repository for ready-to-install binary packages (this last one is optional of course)
[05:26]	<daurnimator>	hi all
[05:26]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: (but point 3 is the most important for the end-user experience)
[05:26]	<JoeyBorn>	yes, point 3 is pretty big
[05:27]	<JoeyBorn>	and don't forget a UI for browsing 3
[05:27]	<JoeyBorn>	hi daurnimator
[05:27]	<daurnimator>	hows life in X
[05:28]	<hellwolf>	nerochiaro, the package database also should be located in flash, usb or media card, am I right?
[05:31]	<hellwolf>	I think maybe I need to learn more about OSD. I even do not know it's hardware configuration :(
[05:32]	<JoeyBorn>	hellwolf, well, it's a reasonable question anyway.
[05:33]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: yes, if that database is what is used to keep the metadata necessary to install/uninstall packages
[05:33]	<nerochiaro>	hellwolf: i would keep that in flash, so we are sure we always have that available
[06:16]	<JoeyBorn>	ok, I'm off for a bit
[06:17]	<daurnimator>	cya
[06:45]	* nerochiaro leaves. later
[07:08]	<anders_>	Was there a youtube download script written for the osd?
[07:24]	<daurnimator>	theres my lua one
[08:00]	<JoeyBorn>	I've used it (daurn's script) and can testify that it works.
[08:01]	<JoeyBorn>	anders_, and I'm not asking this to pester, I'm just curious.
[08:01]	<JoeyBorn>	what's going on with the XMMS2?
[08:01]	<JoeyBorn>	the audio playing capabilities of the OSD, currently are um, well rudimentary to put it nicely.
[08:37]	<anders_>	JoeyBorn: I should put my patches up somewhere so other people interested can have a look at my xmms2-client-in-mainapp stuff.
[09:50]	<JoeyBorn>	anders_, cool, yeah, that'd be great.
[12:55]	<crweb>	new dev env released, www.limesg.com
[12:56]	<nerochiaro>	crweb: check your spelling please ;)
[12:56]	<crweb>	yeah forgot about that
[12:57]	<nerochiaro>	anyone knows a good flowcharting app for linux ?
[13:00]	<chreekat>	nerochiaro: Depends on your qualification of "good". I think there's something in the kde family that does it
[13:00]	<nerochiaro>	"decent" even
[13:01]	<chreekat>	kivio is the name
[13:01]	<nerochiaro>	thanks
[13:02]	<crweb>	i only found 1 spelling error..
[13:02]	<crweb>	ah
[13:02]	<crweb>	2
[13:02]	<nerochiaro>	crweb: one in the link bar. and there's an error in the text
[13:03]	* chreekat offers his services as grammar nazi
[13:04]	<nerochiaro>	crweb: "first download and install you need to go into the updates" << this doesn't make sense in the context. either add a period or splice the sentence somehow
[13:07]	<crweb>	damn kate wasn't syncing over sftp
[13:09]	<crweb>	nerochiaro: the way i figure it is, my actual ext2 filesystem on my drive is 22mb for osd rootfs, but the cramfs is 6mb
[13:09]	<crweb>	we might have a lot more space than we thought..
[13:09]	<crweb>	depending on compression ratio's
[13:10]	<nerochiaro>	cramfs packs a lot
[13:11]	<crweb>	i almost fit all of qt4 and all of neuros stuff on the osd last night
[13:11]	<crweb>	i'm going to have to drop mysql support or postgresql support to get it to work
[13:12]	<chreekat>	the VM is the dev environment, right?
[13:12]	<crweb>	yes
[13:13]	<chreekat>	and the firmware tarball is what is to be hacked?
[13:14]	<crweb>	firmware tarball provides a booting, running system from nfs that exactly matches the official released firmware version
[13:15]	<crweb>	the whole point of it is that you don't need to build the entire svn repo, to have a system you can write/compile and run software from
[13:15]	<Fatal>	heh neat, one of the kivio guys are probably going to start working at the same place as me :D
[13:15]	<Fatal>	(and anders)
[13:16]	<nerochia1o>	Fatal: i dropped off for a little. "(and anders)" << what did you say before ?
[13:16]	<Fatal>	"heh neat, one of the kivio guys are probably going to start working at the same place as me :D"
[13:16]	<chreekat>	Fatal: where's that?
[13:17]	<Fatal>	Netintact, part of Procera Networks
[13:17]	<nerochia1o>	ah cool
[13:20]	<chreekat>	So then, is the firmware package the destination target for dev projects? E.g. is it what the xmms2 client would be compiled/linked to?
[13:36]	<chreekat>	Also, the text still leaves me, the ignorant reader, unaware of how to use the firmware update
[13:40]	<nerochia1o>	chreekat: you have a point
[13:40]	<nerochia1o>	but inside the update there is probably a readme
[13:41]	<nerochia1o>	chreekat: the firmware package contains all the pre-compiled neuros libraries that you need to link against
[13:41]	<nerochia1o>	and a file system that you can network mount from your OSD
[13:41]	<nerochia1o>	crweb: the firmware update includes the libraries, but what about the headers ?
[15:07]	<nerochia1o>	crweb: you there ?
[15:27]	<crweb>	firmware updates are nothing but nfs booting
[15:27]	<crweb>	for now
[15:27]	<crweb>	I've got to modify scratchbox a little to include the headers
[15:36]	<nerochia1o>	crweb: remember that cowon fb driver, did you say you actually managed to use it ?
[15:37]	<crweb>	no, i didn't have qt working at the time, and osdmain won't run with it because it has a different api
[15:38]	<nerochia1o>	ah, so you never actually seen it working (not with osdmain, just seeing it loading and using it do display something) ?
[15:38]	<crweb>	no i didn't
[15:38]	<crweb>	but it works for the mrobe guys
[15:39]	<crweb>	which is exactly the same
[15:40]	<nerochia1o>	ok
[15:40]	<crweb>	i got it form a guy using it
[15:40]	<crweb>	resolution might need to be modified