PandaBoard, Mer and XBMC

It has been a while when I posted anything about my Pandaboard+MeeGo+XBMC HTPC project, this "pause" has been mainly because of lack of time. Now when Intel announced Tizen and MeeGo was announced to be more or less discontinued as such community started a new project called Mer.

Mer supports more architectures from the beginning than MeeGo did as well as it is a lot smaller and easier to maintain still keeping many of the things that were available in MeeGo as well. So after a while playing with Mer I decided to give the pandaboard and XBMC a go with it and after a while I got it running on my PandaBoard as well. Below is a small video clip that demonstrates the current status of my configuration:

So as shown on the video the XBMC on PandaBoard can already play video files and most of the XBMC features are working as well. Some of the missing parts from the adaptation are audio, WiFi and bluetooth as well as hardware accelerated codecs etc. Mainly because those are proprietary binary blobs and I haven't had time to test those yet.

Image is available for download at http://sage.kapsi.fi/Mer/images/0.20111120.1.CE.2011.11.20.1/mer-tv-armv7l-pandaboard/

MeeGo Tablet UX on N900

Now when the MeeGo Tablet UX packages are published I managed to create an image containing the MeeGo 1.2 developer release with Tablet UX for the Nokia N900. Here is a short video showing some of the features of the image.

I'm also uploading the image and the .ks file to http://meego.openaos.org/ under the n900 directory in near future. File names will be:

• tablet-armv7hl-n900-v01.README
• tablet-armv7hl-n900-v01.ks
• mg-tablet-armv7hl-n900-1.1.90.20110325.2233-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2

NOTE: If you create an image yourself with the .ks file provided the ctrl does not work as a exit button as shown in the video, but you need to modify the meego-ux-daemon package and add following patch:
--- meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0-more-home-keys.patch (revision 0)
+++ meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0-more-home-keys.patch (revision 2)
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+diff -ruN --exclude='*~' meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0.orig/application.cpp meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0/application.cpp
+--- meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0.orig/application.cpp 2011-03-25 22:48:35.078772707 +0200
++++ meego-ux-daemon-0.2.0/application.cpp 2011-03-25 22:49:12.695193354 +0200
+@@ -222,6 +222,8 @@
+
+ grabHomeKey("Super_L");
+ grabHomeKey("Super_R");
++ grabHomeKey("Control_L");
++ grabHomeKey("Control_R");
+ grabHomeKey("XF86AudioMedia"); // WeTab's corner key
+
+ menu = grabKey("Menu");

Enjoy you new MeeGo experience on Nokia N900.

Guide how to install XBMC on MeeGo 1.2

Many asked how they can get the XBMC running on their own MeeGo devices at the time I posted the first video about the XBMC running on top of MeeGo. I finally had time to do some more work on it and created new video where XBMC is running on both Intel and ARM based devices. Also this time I wrote some instructions how all of you can install the XBMC to your own devices as well.

The guide and the video is posted in CybercomChannel blog, which is a blog owned by the company called Cybercom, that I'm currently working for.

Creating bootable Pandaboard MeeGo image with MIC

Here is a quick guide how to create bootable Pandaboard image with MIC.

First of all you need to install MIC and I personally recommend git master because that has the best support for ARM bootstrap installation on non-official MeeGo .ks files. However any MIC should do that is taken from git master after 10th December 2010 that includes the omap vfat patch. The git master can be installed e.g. with following commands:

git clone git://gitorious.org/meego-developer-tools/image-creator.git
cd image-creator
make
sudo make install
cd ..

NOTE: You might need to install some additional packages for more information see MeeGo wiki.

After you have installed the MIC image creator you can start creating the actual image. For this you first need to get a .ks file, in this guide .ks file is downloaded from my pandaboard-image-configuration clone that I have modified and tested. This branch does only bring up the xterm for now as it is just a proof that MIC can actually create an image with suitable partitions for pandaboard.

mkdir panda-image
cd panda-image
wget http://gitorious.org/~sage/pandaboard/sages-panda-image-configurations/blobs/raw/pandaboard/handset/handset-armv7l-panda.ks
sudo mic-image-creator -a armv7l -c handset-armv7l-panda.ks -f raw --run-mode=1 --pkgmgr=yum

NOTE: it seems that the zypp packagemanager does not support all of the kickstart features yet so the --pkgmgr=yum option is required to be used with my .ks file.

After this the mic-image-creator starts creating the image, which will take a some time depending your computer and network speed. When the process is ready MIC will inform you where the image file can be found, e.g.,

Your new image can be found here:
/home/sage/panda-image/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-raw/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-mmcblk0p.raw
/home/sage/panda-image/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-raw/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939.xml

Next thing is to put the image to the SD card, for this you can use the "Installing rootfs on external MMC card" section of MeeGo N900 installation guide.

Enjoy your new pandaboard image. If you have any problems booting the image let me know.

Lenovo N5901 Keyboard for my HTPC solution

I finally received the Lenovo N5901 keyboard that I ordered for my HTPC solution. I also recorded a unboxing video of the keyboard that can be seen below. I will post some user experiences after I get things running.