Music Players and Game Consoles

Long ago, over a long period of time, I wore out my old MP3 player, a Cowon iAudio X5. First its battery life shortened dramatically. Then after severe mistreatment during a long flight, the headphone jack loosened and became very fussy. Only by pushing the plug in a certain way was I able to achieve stereo sound.

Its condition worsened over time, and the final nail in the coffin was hammered in when, in desperation, I opened it up hoping I could readjust the socket somehow. I wound up breaking a wire.

I could solder it back, but what's the use of bringing it back from the dead if it has a run-down battery and a messed-up audio jack? Besides, I now had a great excuse to shop.

I considered getting another product in the same family, such as the A2, but in the end I took a different direction. Two different directions in fact: I wound up buying two MP3 players to replace my old one.

First, some lessons learned:

• I often just pushed play, and didn't bother fiddling around with the controls. Instead I'd cram it into my pocket, and perform other tasks.
• The built-in battery was annoying, especially when traveling. I'd have to find adapters and/or transformers, or have a computer around. Not to mention carry a strange, easy-to-lose connector and a power cord.
• Its utility greatly decreased with its battery life.
• For some situations it was too big and unwieldy, while for others, such as when reading text files and playing movies, it was too small and unwieldy.

To address some of these concerns, I bought one of those small cheap MP3 player that is little more than a USB SD card reader. It's powered by a single AAA battery, and sports a tiny display and a few buttons. It's perfect for those times when I'm focused on something and want some background music. Instead of playlists, I treat SD cards like CDs, and swap in different cards when I want to change genres.

It's convenient to travel with, due to its low cost and small footprint. Furthermore, AAA batteries are readily available anywhere. As a bonus, it can function as a low-capacity USB thumb drive.

However, there are times when I want to read text files or watch movies on the go, and times when I absolutely must listen to that song right now. I also missed my iAudio's ability to play different music formats, and its ability to run the open source firmware Rockbox.

So on an impulse, I recently picked up a GP2X F-200. It does music and video of various formats, but what really piqued my interest was that it plays games and runs Linux. It has two 200MHZ ARM9 processors, which amuses me because only three desktops ago, my system was a Pentium 200. And in line with my new philosophy, it has an SD card slot and is runs on 2 AA batteries.

I still miss the 20 gigabyte hard drive, FM radio and recording capabilities of my X5, but the GP2X offers more possibilities.

Hello, GP2X F-200
Mainstream gamers no doubt prefer the well-known brands for a hand-held gaming platform, as they have a wide selection of new titles and probably have better build quality. But my priorities are different: I mostly wanted a replacement music and video player, and the GP2X appeals to me thanks to its geek cred.

There is a highly active GP2X development scene. It mostly revolves around simple homebrew games, ports of classics, and emulators, but there are a few commerical games, and some of the freeware offerings are amazingly good.

One such gem is Cave Story, which I found on the bundled CD. I'd never heard of this game before, though it's been available for other platforms for quite some time. As a programmer and amateur game developer, I'm green with envy that one person alone was able to create this marvel.

Soon after my unit arrived, I looked into how the development process works. I followed the Open2x installation instructions at the GP2X wiki (except I placed them in a different directory) but for touchscreen support, afterwards I installed the newest version of the SDL library found on Paeryn's page.

I then set about writing the obligatory "Hello World" program. It's not good enough to print to standard output, because nothing shows up. Instead, I wrote a full-blown SDL program that uses the SDL_ttf library to render a string. Additionally, I had to write a shell script to return to the main menu after the program exits (and also sync the SD card).

• hello2x.tar.bz2

Next I augmented the code to experiment with the touch screen, and the result is a simple drawing program. I'm disheartened by many spurious events, though I have a few ideas on how to clean them up. This must be done if I'm to get the most out of this feature.

• touch2x.tar.bz2

Green circles represent when the stylus was placed on the screen, and red circles represents when it was lifted, corresponding to SDL's MOUSEBUTTONDOWN and MOUSEBUTTONUP events. As can be seen, there are times when it thinks you've lifted the stylus when you haven't, and a fair amount of jitter, usually in the horizontal axis.

Linux on a Thinkpad X61

My X31 which I repaired a while ago died again. This time I think the system board is gone, as there are no signs of life. Nothing I do, even plugging in a power cord (and I tried several), will make any of the LEDs light up. It is functionally equivalent to a brick.

I decided to purchase a Thinkpad X61 instead of a replacement system board. I chose to stick with the Thinkpad X series for several reasons. For starters, Thinkpads endure. Well, apart from my X31, though it still outlived other brands I've tried. I even have an old Thinkpad 240 that's still running strong.

Another reason is that I want a good balance of small footprint and performance. I went through a phase long ago where I thought the biggest baddest laptop that money could buy was the right choice, but after trying it once, I discovered clunkiness destroys half the appeal of a laptop, and furthermore, a cheap desktop with accessories will give a much better computing experience.

But most importantly, Thinkpads have a good track record with Linux support. Nonetheless, I did a few quick Google searches to confirm that this was the case for the X61. Happily there are many results.

My X61 arrived last month, and with Vista installed by default. Vista is astoundingly bad. Not only is it slow, but every few actions, everything grinds to a halt until I handle some dialog box about giving permission to some process or other.

I suppose some effort was put into making the interface look slicker, but there is also plenty of extraneous rubbish that serve only as visual distractions and annoyances. Perhaps Microsoft is not entirely to blame, as some of the pop-ups are plastered with the Lenovo logo.

In any case, my new system was unusable. I had to escape from Vista. It had been a long time since I had last installed Linux, as once setup correctly, there's rarely a reason to reinstall. I spent some time learning about the latest installation methods.

Network Installation

There's no need to prepare a floppy, CD or any other kind of removable media. Visit http://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/ from any version of Windows, including Vista, and you can have Debian up and running within minutes.

Note UNetbootin is a similar program for Ubuntu, but Vista support is still in the works.

There was one small hiccup. The Debian-installer loader ran fine, but a reboot brought be back to Vista (taking forever to load of course). After further research I discovered that I had to mess with the BCDEDIT program to set a nonzero delay so I could actually select Debian from the Vista boot menu.

Then deja vu. I was reminded of the first time I tried installed a Linux desktop: back then, it must have taken me a day to get sound working, and another for the network.

The wireless didn't work. Neither did the sound. The "vesa" graphics driver performed badly: switching back to text mode resulted in a blank screen. This system is too new for Debian.

I had read success stories using the development version of Ubuntu ("Gutsy Gibbon"), and a few unsuccessful attempts at getting the wireless working I figured I'd switch.

I tried to do so with UNetbootin (run from Debian) but I must have screwed something up because I was left with an unbootable system: the Grub bootloader had taken over the master boot record, and was somehow configured badly. To salvage the situation, I used a PXE network boot, and from a menu option I installed Gutsy.

The wireless network card (Intel 4965) worked out of the box, as did the "intel" video driver for X windows. Back when I first tried this, and before Gutsy was officially released, sound didn't work and I had to download and compile the development version of ALSA's "hda_intel" driver to rectify this. But the latest version works out of the box.

Various buttons such as the brightness and volume controls have no effect, but if I were so inclined, I could fix this by scripting commands with the aid of the ibm-acpi package.

Mission Accomplished

My laptop is now usable. Not only that, but it is orders of magnitude faster and smoother than any other system I use. I have more to say, but rather than delay this post yet again, I'll save the material for future articles.