Log from #neuros IRC channel

nerochiaro, I was told to ask you about this, okay my primary storage for video on the OSD now is my 4gb microdrive, I want to upgrade to AZ, but I can't devote all 4GB just to the AZ because that's a huge waste, there's no way I can partition it and use like 512mb for AZ and the rest for storage?

[03:27]

it will repartition to one large partition. you can re-partition afterwards if you like

[03:28]

as long as the first partition remain the one that it created, it should be fine

[03:28]

nerochiaro, so I install AZ, it formats and sets up the drive, then afterwards I shrink the partition and add a second one on the end?

[03:28]

yes, that should work

[03:29]

be sure to leave the part you shrink to something a bit larger than the default minimum of 128Mb though

[03:29]

it should work ok with 128Mb, but a bit larger is safer

[03:30]

okay cool. another thing though, right now with the newest non AZ firmware, my microdrive only shows up if I boo the OSD with it inserted..any idea?

[03:32]

if you plug it in, it's not recognized ?

[03:33]

correct. whereas a normal CF card is. but if I boot the OSD with the microdrive inserted its recognized and functions perfectly for recording and playback

[03:34]

hmm, it may be that uboot CF driver does something extra to initialize your driver, and linux CF driver finds it already initialized and it can recognize it. while if you plug it in, the linux driver alone can't initialize it properly. just a guess

[03:35]

with AZ you won't remove it anyway during runtime, so it kind of become a bit moot

[03:35]

well, see thats the thing, if you remove it with AZ it just asks to put it back right? so I could remove it, add some video on the second partition and hopefully put it back in

[03:37]

why can't you just reboot after you do that ?

[03:38]

guess I could, unplugging it from a buried power strip is somewhat difficult, and the power connector on the OSD is already worn out and loose lol

[03:38]

sorry nero i got lost even without asking but i got some idea.. so started working on that to fix that up and you know what it worked :)

[03:38]

but now, i hear you, that would be nice to fix. but the usage case you're suggesting isn't really a "supported" one, officially. you can hack it to work that way, i can help you, but officially it's not going to be fixed i imagine

[03:39]

nerochiaro, okay but you see where I'm coming from though?

[03:40]

Hostile: yes i do. using the CF for storage, guess it will be pretty common. we may officially support something like that in future AZ releases, maybe

[03:40]

putting a bug in bugzilla doesn't hurt

[03:41]

about the microdrive only being recognized on boot?

[03:42]

yes

[03:42]

k. and osd-3.33-y.36.upk, is that the newest AZ build?

[03:43]

can anyone read those versions?

[03:43]

joe posted in ML about that, and the consensus is no

[03:43]

it seems ;)

[03:43]

i never could

[03:43]

it should just be osd-az-1.0.upk

[03:44]

Hostile: i think .37 is the latest, but feel free to file against that one, it doesn't really matter

[03:44]

allyourrejects: i thought changing that numbering scheme would break some compatibility, but if not, we should change the scheme for AZ official for sure

[03:45]

if not the actual version, then at least the file names

[03:46]

i meant the file names. the version inside it's ok to leave it that way

[03:47]

whats the easy way to find new releases and download them?

[03:47]

like I have no clue how to find .37

[03:47]

Hostile: exactly the problem

[03:47]

clap twice, run around in a circle, spin till you are dizzy then check open.neurostechnology.com

[03:48]

Hostile: that will be solved too in AZ official, there will be a web page with all releases

[03:48]

past and present

[03:48]

i like my method

[03:48]

we can actually do something like that now too, if someone that is conversant with .htaccess and apache setup helps me a bit

[03:48]

nerochiaro, so you said theres no difference between .36 and .37?

[03:48]

Hostile: not that will help you in that CF card thing

[03:49]

allyourrejects: the plan is set, i assume you read the email. it's similar to your method

[03:49]

well. I know that, but Im going to try installing AZ now, should I use .37?

[03:50]

sweet, i know we talked a lot about running in a circle once, or twice. But, Joe's idea for only 1/2 a circle was insane.

[03:50]

Hostile: .37 is fine, but both 36 and 37 have an issue with the network updater (that's why there have been no more for a while after these)

[03:51]

* Hostile always updates manually with removable media

[03:51]

it's ok then

[03:52]

except that it formats cf card

[03:52]

keep that in mind...

[03:52]

yeah Im okay with that

[03:52]

allyourrejects: it doesn't always do that

[03:52]

allyourrejects: only on TORFU to AZ

[03:52]

alright, so how do I find .37?

[03:52]

oh right

[03:52]

allyourrejects: or if you force it on AZ to AZ

[03:52]

* allyourrejects assumes everyone is torfu -> az atm

[03:53]

Hostile: ODNT/files/osd-3.33-y.37.upk

[03:53]

k thanks

[03:54]

so just doing the normal upgrade process on the old firmware will take me back?

[03:55]

it should

[04:01]

this Swissknife app seems like it will allow me to shrink and partition the CF card

[04:09]

Hostile: if you use linux, i suggest gparted

[04:09]

or a gparted live CD

[04:13]

yeah actually I have a gparted live cd =P

[04:24]

brb going to try to go partition

[05:28]

nerochiaro: font email is out. If you could get some comments in the thread before john wakes up

[05:28]

so he can get a "whole" picture

[05:30]

i'll try, i'm a bit in a mess now though

[05:30]

no prob. no harm will come

[05:30]

what is up?

[05:31]

need anything?

[05:31]

shakey PAL video problem

[05:31]

ahh

[05:31]

pal output, actually

[05:31]

can't really help there :(

[05:32]

the problem is i can't help either :(

[05:47]

anders_: around ?

[06:15]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: Yeah.

[06:23]

anders_: you did test on the non-QT firmare, right ?

[06:25]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: Yes.

[06:25]

anders_: ok thanks

[06:26]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: Tried both my dvd and my vcr as video source.

[06:27]

anders_: shake should be on the OSD GUI, if there's any

[06:27]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: No shake what so ever.

[06:28]

ok

[06:28]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: I tried different sources to see if it was dependant on syncing to the video source somehow.

[06:32]

anders_: i see. it appears from tests now that it's actually an issue of the new firmware. but thanks for helping

[06:33]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: I have set up the build environment and built trunk, but haven't had time to set up nfs booting and actually testing it.

[06:36]

anders_: no problem

[06:36]

<anders_>

nerochiaro: Well, for me it is :) The problem of not having enough time :)

[06:36]

welcome to the club :)

[09:57]

hello folks

[10:02]

Is anyone free to answer some basic questions?

[10:16]

emotehman: hi, still there ?

[10:17]

yeah, im still here was just working on something else and keeping a sideways eye on this

[10:18]

emotehman: feel free to ask if you still need answers

[10:19]

ok. What I'm trying to do is really not what the device is intended for, but the video muxing capabilities are exactly what we need for a project we are working on

[10:20]

what kind of video muxing abilities do you need ?

[10:20]

we actually had a call with a couple of guys the other day, and they told me you were the man to talk to and that the vplayer application would be a good start. Initally i just need to pop up alerts on the screen

[10:21]

ah, ok

[10:21]

i have that peice working now, but there are some things that I would like to work differently. namely when i call the vplayer program from the command line that it pops up even if the main menu is not currently visible

[10:23]

main menu is always running (i'm assuming you are using the QT-based firmware, right ?)

[10:23]

yes I am

[10:23]

and I know zero about QT. never looked at it prior to Monday

[10:24]

ok, i'm not exactly understanding your issue, can you explain a bit better how you want it to work when you call vplayer from cmd line ?

[10:27]

sure thing

[10:27]

first, i made some changes in vplayerapp.cpp

[10:28]

instead of opening a video, it just looks at the argument that it was passed and based on that arg is opens a message box

[10:29]

if (path == "1")

[10:29]

{

[10:29]

NMessageBox::warning(NULL, QObject::tr("Alert.."),

[10:29]

QObject::tr("Medication is due NOW"),

[10:29]

QMessageBox::Ok, QMessageBox::Ok,

[10:29]

DEF_MSGBOX_TIME);

[10:29]

}

[10:29]

so then i just run that from the console

[10:29]

vplayer 1

[10:29]

the issue is

[10:29]

if a movie is playing you wont see it. but if you hit home on the remote to pull up the menu you do see it

[10:30]

nerochiaro, you around?

[10:30]

emotehman: when you say "if a movie is playing" do you mean another instance of vplayer that is doing playback ?

[10:30]

Hostile: yes ?

[10:31]

nerochiaro, okay got 6 hours of sleep. AZ was set it, booted gparted and resized, then the OSD asked to format the drive for AZ again

[10:31]

set up*

[10:31]

oh, no. i have a dvd player looped in thats running a movie. that movie is playing in the background

[10:32]

emotehman: ah, and when you are in the main menu and see the main menu disappear you also hear a "clunk" sound coming from the OSD, right ?

[10:33]

correct

[10:33]

Hostile: did you try to reboot before gparteding etc ?

[10:33]

yup

[10:34]

emotehman: that's what is called "passthrough mode", and is connecting the video input to video output directly. you need to edit the main-menu app to disable main-menu from engaging passthrough mode

[10:34]

emotehman: or disengage passthrough from your app before you pop up the message

[10:34]

Hostile: when you did reboot, did it ask for formatting ?

[10:35]

ok, that would be better. not using the main menu for this particular app

[10:35]

yeah, and I said Ok. and it fails to format now.

[10:35]

Hostile: i mean: you updated to AZ, then AZ was usable ? then you rebooted and it asked you to format again ?

[10:35]

no, AZ worked fine, it asked me to reformat after I resized the partition in GParted

[10:37]

Hostile: but you successfully rebooted (on your own, not on AZ request) at least one time before trying the parted thing, without getting any request for format ? i ask to check if it's a bug even without your partitioning or not

[10:37]

emotehman: so you actually want to disable the main-menu completely, no ?

[10:38]

Yes I'm pretty sure. but here, I'll go reboot to GParted, format the whole microdrive, and reinstall AZ until it works, then make sure it reboots a few times

[10:38]

well, for now yes. I am going to need a highly customized one later but i can re-enable it later

[10:38]

emotehman: the main menu is launched automatically by the nwm application (which is the window server). if you disable that launch, you should see no menu. and maybe you can make it run your app (or menu) in place of main-menu

[10:39]

Hostile: thanks. if it's just a bug in AZ is one thing, if it's due to the repartitioning we can see why it cause that

[10:40]

so comment that line in /etc/nwm/startup?

[10:41]

emotehman: try that, yes

[10:42]

k brb

[10:44]

ok, apparently i need to set the transparency on my app higher

[10:45]

vplayer should handle that by itself

[10:45]

it should be fully transparent except where you put widgets

[10:45]

or message boxes

[10:45]

well

[10:45]

i commented out that line for main-menu

[10:45]

then restarted

[10:46]

it stuck athe "thinking very hard" message

[10:46]

because it's not running anything, hmm. never actually tried that

[10:46]

so i ran the program by hand, that message went away and my alert popped up. i hit ok and the alert went away but now my dvd in the background is very dark and i can't get the messages to run anymore

[10:48]

ah, ok, i think i get what's happening

[10:48]

when you exit vplayer, try setting back the transparency to full

[10:50]

but this is strange, because last i checked the vplayer didn't set the video trasparency to darker

[10:51]

i dont see anything in the code i have looked at that resembles transparency at all

[10:52]

let me check one thing, one moment

[10:55]

emotehman: ok, this is what happens:

[10:56]

- by default video by default is darker

[10:56]

nerochiaro, k, I've booted AZ successfully like 3 times

[10:56]

- when you run vplayer and play a video, it turns it to fully transparent

[10:57]

- since you don't play the video in vplayer, but just show a msg box and exit, it remains darker

[10:57]

so you have two choices:

[10:58]

actually, one

[10:58]

sounds like an easy choice then!

[10:59]

class OSDFbControl, method setAlphaBlend(OSDFbControl::videoBlendingTransparent)

[10:59]

call this to set the video to fully transparent without darkening

[11:00]

this is usually handled by an helper class, but in your case since you don't show any "real" window, this is not done for you

[11:00]

Hostile: ok. then how do repartition with gparted ?

[11:01]

i resized the first partition to 256mb

[11:01]

created a new partition in the unused spaced

[11:02]

then reboot and AZ tried to reformat ?

[11:02]

yea

[11:03]

Nero, thanks. will look at it after lunch and let you know how it goes

[11:04]

emotehman: you're welcome

[11:05]

Hostile: do you have serial console log ?

[11:05]

of the OSD?

[11:05]

ya

[11:05]

nope, I don't have the serial connection set up

[11:10]

ok, i'm a bit puzzled why it would ask you that reformat, actually

[11:10]

hmm. should I try again?

[11:11]

it usually does that when there's not enough space on the card, when you try to install again the firmware. but that's not the case, it seems. you are not trying to install anything

[11:11]

you are just rebooting after repartitioning

[11:11]

yes

[11:11]

right ?

[11:11]

you shut down OSD, take off the card, repartition on PC, then put in the card and restart OSD ?

[11:12]

yes

[11:24]

Hostile: sorry, had to step away a moment

[11:25]

Hostile: i'm not sure what's happening there, honestly. you may want to wait the following days when we come out with the newer versions that have all the upgrader fixes, and see if that bug is triggered again with these. or try to connect serial and get a log, which may help understand

[11:25]

more

[11:26]

are they instructions to setting up the serial on XP in the wiki?

[11:27]

should be, in the dev env setup guide, workstation setup part

[11:38]

nerochiaro, guide for OSX and linux

[11:38]

no XP

[11:39]

i was sure somewhere it mentioned hyperterminal or something

[11:40]

wiki.neurostechnology.com

[11:40]

just found that before you sent that lol

[11:40]

if it works, can you add a link to that to the dev env setup page with mac and linxu instructions ?

[11:41]

sure. but brb I have to reboot since I have my serial port disabled in my BIOS

[11:52]

nerochiaro, here's something to think about, if i shrink the AZ partition, and do not create a new partition it still boots, but after I create a new partition it does not

[11:53]

so my guess would be AZ doesn't know which partition is its?

[11:53]

you mean, it doesn't ask you to format ?

[11:53]

right

[11:53]

but once I create a FAT32 partition in the free space, it wants to format

[11:54]

sounds like a good theory, it may see both and don't know what to mount. i think we actually covered this case and hopefully fixed it, but not sure it's in that version yet

[11:55]

nerochiaro, okay, I'm booting it now watching the serial

[11:57]

Hostile: if you can log it, better

[11:58]

nerochiaro, I don't see any errors in the boot, I logged in, theres a CF-card1 and CF-card2

[11:58]

so both partitions are showing up, I think its confused

[11:58]

uh, wait

[11:59]

what does ls /dev/hd* say ?

[11:59]

i guess it shows hda[1-4] right

tons of hds

no

it shows hda1-4

hdb1-4

etc

yes, ok

all the way up to hdd

[12:00]

my CF card is hda1 and hda2

[12:04]

what does "ps" show ? can you pastebin that ?

[12:04]

you're on the message box that ask you to reformat, right ?

[12:04]

right. is core-updater that message box?

[12:05]

that's it

[12:05]

is there also "panic" somewhere

[12:05]

?

[12:05]

hmm. I killed it just to see what it would do

[12:05]

yup

[12:05]

kill panic too, then "/etc/init.d/nwm start" and see what happens

[12:06]

$ /usr/local/bin/nwm: error while loading shared libraries: libQtGui.so.4: can

[12:06]

not open shared object file: No such file or directory

[12:06]

nerochiaro, why when I do ls /media/CF-card1 all there is lost+found, yet df -h shows it has 70 mb used

[12:07]

nerochiaro: /dev/hd* will always have the same info

[12:07]

allyourrejects: my mistake, yes

[12:07]

Hostile: what "mount" does say '

[12:07]

?

[12:07]

Hostile: ls -a

[12:08]

hmm, actually nevermind. it shouldn't have mounted the two partitions that way. it should've mounted one of the two on /media/ext i think

[12:08]

allyourrejects: i think that version is still the version without the multi-partition fixes ?

[12:08]

yeah, the first should not have been mounted on media, the 2nd is ok

[12:08]

i'm not sure. It worked before we touched it

[12:09]

multi partition i mean

[12:09]

nerochiaro, I manually mounted hda1 on /media/ext

[12:09]

restarted nwm and it works

[12:09]

lol funny

[12:09]

means you had a good ld.so.cache

[12:09]

dunno how that happened

[12:10]

so, we have the problem, it's mounting hda1 as media, instead of mounting it on /media/ext

[12:10]

how do we fix it?

[12:10]

reboot it again just for shits & giggles

[12:10]

then pastebin the output to us

[12:11]

pastebin the entire bootup?

ya

yeah

k

hey, at least we know its possible to get to work

[12:15]

hyperterminal only gives 500 backscroll lines...

[12:15]

it has to be some logging to file option

hmm not that i see

ah okay

I got it

have to capture text, then boot

[12:21]

nerochiaro, allyourrejects, pastebin.ca

[12:28]

Hostile: and at the end of that log, panic and then core-updater are run, right ?

[12:29]

nerochiaro, it doesn't show it

[12:29]

but a ps does

[12:30]

ok

[12:30]

so, what do you think

[12:31]

someone is getting confused and mounting that partitions wrong

[12:31]

can you pastebin the result of mount -a like allyourrejects suggested ?

[12:31]

ah shoot, I'll reboot because I manually mounted and started nwm

[12:32]

that's better

[12:32]

hm. XMMS2 not playing my music is another thorn in my side, but thats another issue

[12:32]

Hostile: the amazon clips ?

[12:33]

it is an amazon clip. it must hate nicely encoded mp3s though, because it does it with a lot of my high quality mp3s, and with this amazon one

[12:34]

Hostile: one thing to verify is that xmms2 does it also on PC,or not

[12:34]

k. I did a mount -a

[12:37]

is JoeBorn around?

[12:38]

Hostile: what does it say mount -a ?

pastebin it

it says nothing?

just "mount" ?

nerochiaro, this is just 'mount' pastebin.ca

[12:43]

allyourrejects: aside mounting /dev/hda1 to the wrong place, i think it should've mounted it as ext3, not ext2, which is also probably why you can't see anything in it ?

[12:43]

Hostile: can you umount it and remount it (in the same place is ok) as ext3 ?

[12:43]

see if ls gives something ?

[12:43]

nerochiaro: that is also not related

[12:43]

he can't see anyting because the dir is .osd_programs

[12:43]

ah, ok

[12:44]

which is why i sad ls -a