Johannes' Blog

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

It's been a while since my last entry, so here is a little something. As requested, here is a little Ben NanoNote vs. Zipit Z2 comparison.



The machines have both a very similar shape and size and their specifications are also not too different. While the Ben NanoNote was meant to be Open Source hardware the Zipit Z2 was built as an instant messaging device for teenagers and was then repurposed by the hacker/free software community as a more or less general purpose Linux computer.

Here is a new Gmu release with some new (long awaited) features. The two most notable features are internet streaming audio support and the graphical spectrum analyzer. Just like with the 0.7.0 series I start the 0.8.0 series with a beta release, mostly because there were many changes to the code base.



Changes since the last release include:

• Internet streaming audio support on network-enabled devices (for web radio, currently mp3 only)
• Graphical spectrum analyzer
• Support for PLS playlist files
• Fixed time display bug for very long playtimes
• Window icon for platforms running Gmu in a windowed environment
• By default Gmu's file browser now advances to the next file when adding a file (optional)

Probably less interesing for the ordinary user:

• Configurable verbosity on stdout (with the -v flag)

deeice from the #zipit irc channel has put together a Gmu package for IZ2S among several other things for IZ2S. So for those of you with uboot-less Zipits running IZ2S, go grab that package!

I have modified anarsoul's mplayer patch to work with the current MPlayer 1.0rc4. This patch adds support for the PXA27x video overlay which improves video playback performance a lot.