Graham White: My Notes

Buying a Joggler is pretty simple, you can just go to the O2 shop and get one for one hundred of our UK pounds, or fifty if it's on sale.  The reason for putting "the how" in this isn't to teach you how to buy stuff on the net.  No no, more to say you can get it for less than fifty quid if you're careful!  Those of us who work for IBM have been buying them through a money saving web site we have access to as IBMers such that you buy the Joggler and a PAYG Mobile Internet USB dongle (which you're not obliged to use) for a total of £60 and get £25 cashback for doing so.  That's £35 for a Joggler and mobile Internet, bargain!  I would think this sort of offer must be out there in the wider world too if you look carefully enough.

So why do I, or you for that matter, want one?  There's lots of different uses for it.  Even if you look at it as a dumb wireless digital photo frame then it's far cheaper than other wifi frames out there.  The neat thing about it is it runs a version of Linux internally, has a USB port and is also capable of booting from USB.  This means you can run pretty much anything you like on there instead of the default O2 interface.  So, it's the ideal hacking toy and can become a fully fledged computer system disguised as a photo frame if you choose to do so.  The sky is the limit.

For me, I use it as a low power home server running:

• remote login to home (ssh)
• music streaming (squeezebox server)
• internet connected photo frame (gphotoframe)
• trivial internet browsing (chrome + touchscreen addon)
• file server (nfs, http, ftp, smb, etc as required)
• backup server (rsync) 

I've also found it very useful to have a computer connected to my printer for wifi print serving from my laptop in the past.  Currently the Joggler isn't located next to my printer so I'm not doing this but it's definitely an option for the future.  Similarly I may eventually reconnect my current cost meter for home power monitoring, sending daily electricity bill via email, graphing and storing stats.  Another use I could put it to is as a WOL client so wake up other machines in the house remotely so I don't leave them powered on all day (not that I do this anyway), but I haven't configured WOL yet.

Not investigated yet but it seems to me it should be possible to run the OpenPeak apps on Linux too.  These are just flash applications so I should be able to run them on the Linux desktop without any issues which would provide me with the same functionality I would get from the original O2 interface under my own Linux.

You can find a lot more of my information about the Joggler at my Joggler Index post. I also have a list of Joggler Bookmarks.

Having recently had my little whinge about setting up the SqueezeBox Duet it's about time I said something about the box itself. Both professional and user reviews around the web are pretty much universally glowing with praise for it and I have to say to a large extent I agree.

First of all, there's the hardware which is sleek looking with a glossy black finish. The hardware is in two parts (ignore the odd cable here and there), the SqueezeBox Receiver:

Which, while not belittling the technicality of it, is to the consumer essentially just a dumb receiver box. It takes an audio stream over either a wired or wireless Ethernet connection and spits it out through your stereo using a digital or analogue audio connection. Then there's the controller:

Which is an altogether more exciting piece of kit. It's a wifi-device that can talk directly to your wifi router or be bridged onto your wired network via the Receiver if you don't have wifi. It features a rather strangely arranged set of controls that become familiar after a little usage. There is a jog dial with selection button, then buttons for playback, volume, control of the playlist and navigation around the menus. As you can see, it's got a nice full colour LCD display too. This means you can wander around anywhere within wireless range, control your music and get feedback directly on the device on just about anything you might want to know.

Software wise, things also come in two parts (well three if you count the firmware on the receiver). There's the software on the controller and some software to run on your PC which is listed as optional but I would consider very much essential. Both of these parts are open source with decent plugin interfaces and documented APIs you can access.

The controller runs a customised embedded Linux distributions known as Squeeze OS which is responsible for running the user interface application on the controller called Squeeze Play. The nice thing about this is you can take the user interface part, Squeeze Play, and run it on your desktop too. While the controller software is open source and pluggable, I haven't found anybody having written any useful applets to run within Squeeze Play yet but it's still early days so hopefully those people producing screen savers will come up with some good ideas for applets. That said, I can have a bit of a hack around too to see how easy it is to program for and whether I can produce something useful too.

The open source server software is called Squeeze Center and should be run somewhere with access to your local music collection. It supports a huge number of formats including flac, ogg and mp3 of course. Squeeze Center is hugely flexible and configurable, mostly through a bunch of supplied plugins. It provides a web interface as well as access to other interfaces so it can also be used to control the music playing as well as being the configuration hub for the entire setup.

Out of the box Squeeze Center provides access to your local music collection via a number of sorting methods (such as by artist, album, song, genre, etc) as well as providing standard playlist functionality. It also allows you to listen to Internet radio through a number of free and paid for services such as shout cast streams, mp3tunes and last.fm (a last.fm scrobbler plugin is also included). It gives you a favourites menu so you can tag anything as a favourite and later get quick access to it through this menu. Last but not least there's the Extras which doesn't do a huge amount out of the box (this is where most 3rd party plugins are accessed) but it does give you access to podcasts - you can subscribe to RSS or OPML podcast feeds and have them streamed to your hi-fi, cool!

I like to use dynamic playlists and that's some functionality that doesn't get included by default so I've found some plugins that do that for me now. Being a UK resident I want access to the BBC audio content and some kind person has written a plugin to access all their content too, including Live Radio streams, listen again streams as well as BBC podcasts. The final plugin I'm finding useful at the moment is one that automatically adds tracks to my music collection when I copy them to my music directory using a groovy Linux kernel feature, Inotify, otherwise you have to rescan your collection manually after adding new tracks. The plugins I've installed are tagged in Delicious.

Overall, the system seems to work very well. It's great having the flexibility of having an entire music collection at your finger tips ready to play, no messing with things that spin any more, and having access to all the additional content over the Internet is another real bonus. The packaging and interface of the components are really nice and are only set to get better over time, particularly as they're open source. This means I can get my hands on extra code in the form of those useful plugins as well as writing my own. But it also means when Slim Devices get caught up in adding support for new products or bug fixing as they inevitably will, new functionality will always be progressing at least through the community. So now I've got everything fixed up in my config, listening to music at home is quite a cool experience, happy days!

My recent experiments with installing Ubuntu on my little home server came to an end this weekend. I'm working hard to debug problems with my media streamer software, SqueezeCenter. After finding tons of forum posts and various problems with installing SqueezeCenter on Hardy Heron I decided to try another approach so I'm now running Fedora 9 at home instead. Both Hardy and Fedora 9 are supposed to be supported by Slim Devices for their Squeeze-stuff. However, it appears neither of these work but I'll save that rant for another day once I've worked out what's wrong (I have my suspicions about Slim Devices testing against Perl 5.10).

I'm actually quite relieved to be back in my comfort zone with Fedora at home again. I really enjoyed the experience of playing with Ubuntu but it's just not for me for various reasons...

I've met quite a few Canonical guys in my professional role and they've all been great; helpful, very approachable and in the case of some, such as Jono Bacon very decent techies too. That's not my experience with non-Canonical Ubuntu contributors though. I found if the Ubuntu documentation (which is excellent for pretty much everything before Hardy Heron right now) failed me, then talking to the community was not a good experience. I found I was met with an abrupt RTFM attitude in most instances, where the assumption of the community is that people asking questions are dumb. Personally, I blame this on the typical Ubuntu user being non-technical where Linux is concerned so I guess the community receive lots of silly questions which must get annoying at times. All that said, I still believe Ubuntu is really important and plays an extremely valuable role in trying to bring Linux to a more mass audience.

I also found Hardy to be down level in various instances compared with the packages available in Fedora 9. The big one for me here, on my little server, is the OpenChrome drivers for the graphics chipset. Fedora have the version that supports my chipset, but when I asked about inclusion in Ubuntu there was no interest in updating the down level version in their repositories. I also enquired about the broken Via proprietary driver in Ubuntu which resulted in the Via driver being marked for removal! So rather than update the open drivers or fix the package for the proprietary drivers, the response was to remove the proprietary one and not update the open driver which left me in a position of manually maintaining my own graphics driver until the next major Ubuntu release.

I've used RPM and yum way more than I have deb and apt so I sway towards the former simply through familiarity. Having the chance to play with debs again recently has been great too, there's some nice additional touches you don't get with RPM such as the suggested packages and the ability to remove dependencies installed with a certain package, etc. Ubuntu have done a nice job of packaging this all up with Synaptic too. Aside from those few nice-to-haves I don't really see any other advantages to the Ubuntu system, yum and RPM would do exactly the same job when fronted by Synaptic but as ever in the world of open source having choice and competition is good.

Hiding root from the general user is a decent idea too, no need for that confusion in a simple desktop environment, and makes it feel a little closer to what people expect from a Windows box.

Gnome is the desktop of choice for both mainstream Ubuntu and for Fedora so I've been going with that recently instead of my usual choice of KDE. I've been really impressed with Gnome too, for a simple desktop environment it's fantastic but I know if I were to use it every day there would be some features and tools I use regularly under KDE that I would dearly miss. However, I think I've been converted for home use over to Gnome, particularly as KDE is going through turbulent times with their version 4 releases right now. Having everything written in one toolkit is really nice, you can't avoid running GTK and QT apps under KDE but at least under Gnome you have the option of not running QT and sticking with the same look and feel everywhere.

I hope I managed to stabalise on one distribution soon so SqueezeCenter actually works, I get the feeling that will likely be Fedora 8 in the short term until Slim Devices get their act together for Perl 5.10 if my current thoughts are correct. So for now at least it's goodbye to Ubuntu until the next time I give it a run somewhere.

With my new toy now in hand the time soon came to get it installed with Linux. At first glance it might appear to be tricky to install given the lack of CD or Floppy drives. However, it boots from just about anything you attach to it whether that's USB, Compact Flash or Network Boot. Setting up a one-time PXE server seemed a little over the top so I was planning to boot from a USB stick until I found someone at work with a USB CDROM.

Usually I like to run Fedora at home, it's the thing I'm most comfortable with having spent my career tinkering with Red Hat and SUSE based distributions so one of the things I wanted to do with this box was install the much hyped Ubuntu distribution. This wasn't to see what all the fuss is about (I'm familiar with Ubuntu having tried it a couple of times before but always gone back to Fedora) but really just so I can get to know it even better. This machine is going to be part desktop and part server so Ubuntu kind of makes sense too.

I installed the hard disk into the box myself and once I got over some initial hardware niggles (that I caused I should add) the installation was simple. Boot from USB CDROM with the Hardy Heron CD in it and the rest is history. It's amazing how such a small box can run a full whack desktop operating system and do all that on just 8 watts.

In these early days, I have three things in mind for the box. The primary use will be to serve my music collection to my stereo; next is to connect my current cost meter to allow some more in-depth analysis of our power usage at home; then there's simply using it as a desktop for the simpler day-to-day computer usage i.e. browsing the web.

Setting up the music streaming was pretty easy after transferring my collection to the hard disk. I added the apt sources for the SqueezeCenter software that operates with my SqueezeBox Duet, did an apt-get update and an apt-get install squeezecenter and job done. The TinyTuxbox can much better cope with running the MySQL server this is based on along with the web front end and the music collection scanning services associated with the software than the SLUG I tried previously. All in all, couldn't have been much easier.

I've not tried hooking up my current cost meter yet, ironically I've run out of power sockets near the computer with only a six-way adapter and plugs for the PC, TinyTuxbox, Printer, Monitor, ADSL Modem Router, and speakers although it shouldn't be a hard problem to rectify.

Last of all, one of the additional benefits of this low-power box is every day usage. It can easily run a web browser so instead of starting up a large PC just for this, we can switch to the TinyTuxbox desktop and browse there. This should add to our power saving, even though it's likely the TinyTuxbox will be run all the time soon to serve the current cost data. That reminds me, I really should discuss batch-uploading of current cost data so I can save even the 8 watts the TinyTuxbox uses most of the time too.

At first glance, installing slimserver (now SqueezeCenter) on the SLUG is very straight forward as it's nicely packaged into an ipkg and made available via Optware. However, as indicated on the slimserver application page on the nslu2-linux wiki, things aren't as simple as they first appear. Unfortunately, something is very broken with slimserver and its dependency chain in Optware as things stand at this moment in time. As a result installing slimserver with a view to upgrading to squeezecenter at a later date becomes much more problematic. I need at least SqueezeCenter version 7.0 to operate with the SqueezeBox Duet.

My first target was to run slimserver 6.5.4 which is the latest version from the version 6 line and the version packaged for the SLUG in optware. I tracked the problem down to the mysql dependency for slimserver, it seems since the last update of slimserver in optware, mysql has also been updated and since that time slimserver has been reported as broken on the SLUG. Unfortunately, rolling back versions in optware is not trivial since they only make available the latest version with no access to previously packaged programs. My only option was to check out the mysql build environment from SVN at the previous level and compile up the package from source. This is reported to take in the region of 18 hours natively on the SLUG so I set up a cross-compilation environment on my Fedora 8 box at home. MySQL compiled in about 10-15 minutes and I now had a package to install. The reports were correct, slimserver 6.5.4 was now running on my SLUG, excellent!

The next challenge was to get SqueezeCenter running, and this worked in a similar way to getting slimserver going. There are a few oddities with getting all your ducks in a row while running this stuff on a SLUG, SqueezeCenter is very particular about file permissions, and the newer software introduces a whole bunch of Perl dependencies not present in the earlier slimserver versions. Fortunately, I'm very familiar with Perl as well as Linux (one of the reasons for choosing a squeezebox) and I've managed to compile up the minimum dependencies to get SqueezeCenter going. It seems Slim Devices as a company test against x86 and PPC architectures to the extent they even supply their Perl dependencies for these from CPAN. I'm running on ARM on the SLUG though which introduces a whole world of dependency problems as it seems SqueezeCenter is also pretty sensitive to the version of each Perl module used, it's not just a case of grabbing the latest and greatest from CPAN, a further bind for getting it going nicely. One other thing, CPAN doesn't seem to run at all well on the SLUG, it's far faster to download the tarred packages and compile manually!

I eventually got SqueezeCenter 7.0.1 running on the SLUG, it consumes at least twice the 32MB RAM available so runs pretty slowly while spending a lot of time paging to the USB disk. I set up an additional swap file on disk as well, thinking about it perhaps I should have used the rest of the 8MB flash as swap too! All in all, running SqueezeCenter on a machine with so little memory and on an architecture not supported by Slim Devices has equated to a slow response time and a maintenance headache.

In conclusion, it's been a good experience getting a SLUG and setting up SqueezeCenter on it. But I already need a more powerful box so less than 1 week after the SLUG arrived at my house it's time to sell already. Fortunately, I've found a buyer at work who wants something low power for some really trivial services so the SLUG is ideal for them. For me though, it's a case of getting back to scratching my head over which low power home server solution to try next. Whatever I choose will be more expensive than the SLUG, it's possible I could equal its low power usage, and I definitely now know I need more memory and ideally an x86 architecture.

Having recently upgraded my home audio system, the choice of which media streamer to go for was not a hard decision. There are a few different manufacturers out there producing different types of hardware that would result in completely different solutions. These seem to be categorised into roughly three areas.

First, you have the traditional hi-fi system manufacturers who are adding more modern media methods to their kit. Sony have the gigajuke systems with built-in hard disks, while phillips have the streamium systems. I discounted these fairly early on as being rather expensive and full of gimicks I wouldn't really care about or use, while not providing the full functionality that I really wanted at a price I was happy with.

Next there are the traditional NAS manufacturers who are upgrading their firmware to include media streaming functionality. This was slightly more tempting in some ways than a stereo system with this functionality built in. However, the lack of remote control or feedback without a PC switched on was very off-putting here.

What I really wanted was something to stream music from a PC to an existing stereo system that provided good feedback to the user with a remote control too. Enter the third set of devices, the dedicated media streamers designed to work with various media servers such as Firefly, SlimServer, iTunes, etc. When looking at these, my choices were quickly narrowed to a set of 3 possible candidates, in descending order of price:

1. A collection of various Sonos hardware
   
2. A SqueezeBox Duet from Slim Devices (now owned by Logitech
   
3. A Pinnacle Soundbridge
   

I would have dearly liked to get my hands on the market leading Sonos which tops all the reviews while having the reviewer salivate over their nicely designed hardware, excellent interface and crystal sound quality. However, coming in at £700 sterling it seemed a bit expensive, especially as I would be spending more on another hi-fi system too, so it was reluctantly ruled out quite early on.

The next rejection waas the Pinnacle Sound Bridge, rejected for many reasons. It's easily the cheapest of the three on the list at under £100 though. I found it very difficult to find a dealer in the UK who had these things in stock so that was one rather off-putting factor - if there's no demand, then how good could the product be? The killer for me was when I compared to the Roku Soundbridge though. I found out Pinnacle license the soundbridge technology from an American firm, Roku, for marketing in Europe. That's all very well, except the European Soundbridge is inferior (much smaller and less usable display). This annoyed me to such an extent I felt I couldn't buy the European model and there are no American models for sale over here, except possibly some second hand ones on eBay.


The option I went for is the Slim Devices SqueezeBox Duet which seems like a really nice bit of kit, although not exactly cheap to buy either. It comes in two parts, the receiver box you hook up to your stereo system, and the remote control you use to browse and control the music.

The receiver is a pretty simple box, it has an Ethernet port, built-in wireless, RCA analogue audio output, and a digital output too. It sits on your network waiting for commands from the squeezebox controller and outputting any media streams it receives to a stereo (or powered speakers).

The controller is a little more interesting. It's also a wireless device, and has a jog wheel and LCD screen. Wireless means you don't have to have line of sight to the receiver, so you can hide the receiver away somewhere out of sight near your stereo. The interface is quite polished and very easy to understand. It's firmware upgradeable too so it'll only get better over time.

One of the things I really love about the SqueezeBox stuff is their openness. They use open source development to produce the SqueezeCentre (formerly slimserver) media streamer and as such it's got a nice little community of people outside the main company producing plugins to do all sorts of stuff as you can imagine. They adopt a similar approach for their firmware as well, while I've not come across the source code yet (I've not looked to see if it's available), the controller has some nice open type touches to it such as the ability to use your flickr pictures as the screensaver on the LCD screen when it's not in use. Overall I hope, and I think, I've made a good choice.