Johannes' Blog

Gmu Music Player 0.9.1 released!

Here is a minor update to the previously released Gmu 0.9.0.

It comes with some new features and bugfixes, including:

• Volume control in gmuc Gmu ncurses interface
• Flush input buffer in gmuc when handling scrolling to allow for more precise scrolling on slower devices
• New Gmu command line option -l: Allows to specify a playlist file to load on start
• Minor update to the default theme with the large font (playback time was a little off-screen on small displays)
• README.txt update (adding some more information about gmuc)
• BUILD.txt update (adding some information about the various Makefile targets)
• Configuring gmuhttp to listen on external interfaces should work reliably now

It's been a long time, but here I am, back with a new Gmu release.



Gmu 0.9.0 comes with the lots of changes (and some bug fixes). Some of the most important ones are:

• A much nicer large font (Pandora default and compo themes, pixeled by hand :)
• Some additional characters in both large and small fonts (including the µ character due to popular request)
• A new ncurses terminal text frontend for Gmu (usable over the network!)
• Experimental WebSocket browser interface (also usable over the network)
• Support for Joystick axis control in SDL frontend (to support devices like the Caanoo, that come with analog controls exposed as a joystick)
• The current playmode is now always visible in playlist view in the SDL frontend
• Gmu has been changed such that it uses UTF-8 encoding internally for all text
• Support for building Gmu statically has been added (in addition to the default configuration where Gmu's frontends and decoders are build as runtime loadable plugins)

Since it has been a little quiet around the Gmu development, I wanted to give short sign of life.

notaz has updated the Pandora Linux kernel git repository. There is now a Linux 3.2 branch available, which I have used to create a new ArchLinux Pandora kernel package. Unfortunately the keyboard issue still has not been resolved in this kernel tree, which is why I again had to manually revert the changes that introduced the keyboard glitches. I don't know why this is still not fixed, but in the new kernel package the keyboard works just fine, of course.

I highly recommend to update to this new kernel, as it comes with several Pandora specific improvements, compared to the previous 2.6.37 kernel:

• More stable wifi connections
• Shutdown from within Linux (e.g. with 'halt') works now
• The second sd card slot works

To update to the new kernel, run the following command as root:

# pacman -Sy linux-pandora

Pacman will ask for a confirmation that you want to replace the kernel26-pandora package with the new linux-pandora package, which you should reply to positively by pressing 'Y'.

At this point you should restart your system. You can do that by executing 'reboot' as root.

Afterwards you might want to upgrade the rest of your Arch system:

# pacman -Syu

It is always a good idea to update the installed packages with pacman every now and then.

For those who might want to compile their own Pandora kernel, you can use my kernel configuration, if you like.

The Pandora console comes with two USB ports - an ordinary USB host port and a Mini-USB port which is USB-OTG compliant. Unfortunately, the USB host port is not fully USB compliant, because it does not support USB full speed and low speed devices. Most (if not all) USB HID devices like mice and keyboards are USB low speed devices and as such they do not work when connected to the USB host port without a USB 2.0 hub in between.



The Mini-USB port on the other hand supports USB low speed and full speed devices with a passive adaptor (Mini-USB-A plug to Standard USB-A socket). That means one can attach a USB mouse to the Pandora without a USB hub using the OTG port.