Johannes' Blog

Attention! There is a newer version available!

Here is a new release of the Gmu Music Player. Version 0.10.0 comes with a couple of new features and bugfixes. Also, lots of code has been changed/rewritten for better quality, security and performance. Since Gmu turns 10 this year (I released the first version of Gmu for the GP2X back in 2006), 0.10.0 seems like a suitable version number for this anniversary release.



Noteworthy new features and bugfixes:

• A configuration dialog in the SDL frontend for configuring lots of Gmu settings previously configurable through the config file only is now included
• Gmu now stores its configuration and playlist information in XDG compliant locations (typically ~/.config/gmu and ~/.local/share/gmu)
• An Ogg Opus decoder plugin for decoding Opus audio files
• A new module decoder plugin using the OpenMPT decoder library
• An experimental media library feature (disabled by default; only usable from gmuc currently)
• Optional fade-out on skip feature (fades out the current track when user explicitly chooses another track)
• A few fixes for supporting musl libc based systems
• More robust networking code in gmuc (faster detection of lost connection) and Gmu
• Command line mode for gmuc utility for controlling Gmu through command line commands e.g. "gmuc play /path/to/file.ogg" or "gmuc pause"
• Improved build system with a configure script for auto detecting features (not autotools based)

This is mostly a source release right now, but I have built a version for the Z2 as well. It has been built using mozzwald's OpenWRT toolchain, so it runs on OpenWRT with musl libc.

Source gmu-0.10.0.tar.gz (493 KB)
md5sum: 6fda24acfd63bbda56e5fe227b2e5027

Zipit Z2 OpenWRT build gmu-0.10.0-zipit-z2.zip (475 KB)
md5sum: b746a7595e58f5b2360661c85de49cba

With all the recent activity around the Z2, I thought it might be worth it to create an up to date Arch Linux image for the Z2. Although it is theoretically possible to update my old image, it is quite some pain to actually do so. So what I did is take an official system image for an ARMv5 plattform from the ArchLinuxARM website and modify it to work with the Z2.

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)

Quite some time ago, I have written a blog entry about how to install Arch Linux on the Zipit Z2, but I did not provide an image back then. Now I have prepared a ready-to-use image of Arch Linux ARM for the Z2.



It is based on official up-to-date packages. Only for the kernel I had to build one compatible with the Z2.