SqueezePlay running on Maemo

[idowantapickle]

Hi,

I've got the svn source of SqueezePlay running on my N800 and N810 (Maemo 4 - Diablo).

First impressions are that it runs fairly well in full screen and is nice and responsive as a controller, not looked at the audio side of things yet though.

I tweaked both the WQGVAsmallSkin and large skin to use 800x480 full screen and resized one of the backgrounds. The large skin looks a lot better but doesn't have the navi buttons or menu icons. Now Playing has lots of dead space. Touchscreen, navi pad and back buttons all work fine.

Some compilation notes:
I used libreadline5 from the maemo-extras repo
Compile errors in decode_portaudio.c:
(cast increases required alignment of target type), I just commented out the offending lines.

Runtime error:
ERROR audio.output - decode_alsa_check_pids:48 exit, playback child is dead
Commented out the exit call in this case to allow the app to continue executing

What would need doing:
1: Investigate audio playback
2: SDL not playing nicely with Hildon frameworks, needs some maemo specific tweaks I think
3: Menu item packaging - currently I'm launching it from a shell script
4: 800x480 skin creation
5: Flick scrolling is a bit hit and miss

Its a lot more useable than last time I tried this, about a year and a half ago now. Looks like it may be munching on the battery but it might be that my battery is on its way out anyway.

As I understand it only Logitech can distribute binaries right?

[bklaas]

I'm very soon going on a few days holiday but wanted to pipe in and say that this is really really awesome. I've been wondering about squeezeplay on maemo for a time now, and I'm impressed you got as far as you have.

The licensing thing is an ongoing issue and is covered by this bug:

https://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14194

It might get a little hairy if Logitech decides that SP on maemo would cut into our hardware sales (I'm not saying that it would, I'm just saying that they might think so). I'd recommend following that bug for updates.

Seriously though, extremely cool stuff.

cheers,
#!/ben

[Nikhil]

Wow ... would it be possible to get this running on an aging Nokia 770? I have one that is in perfect working order that is sitting around gathering dust. Perhaps with one of the newer Hacker Edition versions of Maemo?

[idowantapickle]

I think the 770 should be possible, I did get a very early build of SP running under Chinook ages ago (on the N810), and I think that this is what the hacker editions are forked from.

Whats really interesting is that the N770 and N8x0 can dual boot with poky linux, which is what I believe the controller firmware is based on...

[signor_rossi]

Wow ... would it be possible to get this running on an aging Nokia 770? I have one that is in perfect working order that is sitting around gathering dust. Perhaps with one of the newer Hacker Edition versions of Maemo?

You might try to run Squeezeplay on your music server and access it via VNC, last time I tried it it already worked very good, now that Squeezeplay has a skin for touch screen use it should work even better. Will try to get it work it again that way, now that there is a touch skin.

signorRossi.

[mrfantasy]

Wow, this is cool! I've really been wanting audio playback on the N810--although I've been using Canola with the Squeezeboxserver streaming support, and that works pretty well. In fact, I've been doing it tethered to my 3G phone while driving. But native playback would be great. I hoped that Squeezeplay wouldn't be hard to port to the N810 so I'm glad to see it working.

[puppygristle]

Thought I'd just register to say that squeezeplay compiles fine on fremantle too. Well everything except for flac that is. I didn't try to fix this though. I just commented it out from the makefile.

I tested it on scratchbox. Everything including audio works. SDL seems to work fine on fremantle. The only problem is that it seems to assume that it has been opened in a window of size 800x480. While that is the correct resolution of the screen, this doesn't take the menu bar into account.

[idowantapickle]

Great stuff - is that an x86 or ARM target? Not had much of a play with the freemantle sdk yet.

For the menu bar issue did you try setting SDL to full screen? You can do this in one of the skin files - just pass in 800, 480, true in the setup. This doesn't need a rebuild.

The flac issue could maybe be resolved by using a prebuilt lib from maemo extras - I was planning on going through the dependencies at some point and figuring out which ones are already present.

Theres another thread here btw:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32012

[puppygristle]

Thanks for the tip to get full screen. Works a charm. The target is x86, but I'm hoping that Nokia has built the sdk properly and building an ARM version won't cause any additional problems.

The last time I compiled squeezeplay was a few weeks ago, so I used the pre-touch version of squeezeplay. Today I tried the latest version. I got it compiled and running fine. Unfortunately, I have the same problem as you. The sound doesn't work.
On a more positive note though, I've actually sorted the flac issue so it compiles properly. The problem was caused by autoconf. The autoconf which comes with the fremantle sdk is verison 2.13, but squeezeplay requires 2.60. In order for flac to compile, it needed the VERSION string to be passed to the format.c file. This wasn't happening, so instead I just added an extra line with define VERSION ="1.2.1"

The old version of squeezeplay now works perfectly, although to compile it, it is necessary to run autoreconf first to deal with the autoconf problem.

[Nikhil]

idontwantapickle, thanks for the PM reply.

All,

As I mentioned before, I have a fully functional Nokia 770 that's simply sitting around gathering dust. It would really be super awesome if that could be converted into a dedicated SqueezePlay controller. Ideally I would like to to simply boot straight into SqueezePlay and to remove anything else that is unessential to maximize processor and memory availability to SqueezePlay. What do you think is the best way to proceed? Maemo or Poky? And if Maemo, which version? I succeeded in getting Maemo OS2008HE running on my 770 and though it crashes every now and then, and is a bit slow, it seems a lot more slick than the original OS. Poky on the other hand is very bare-bones - perhaps a good thing, but I haven't figured out how to get the wireless working with that. Any suggestions?

I don't think the Logitech guys would be interested as it is likely to cut into their hardware sales (though realistically there's probably 5 Nokia internet tablets out there in the real world), so I wouldn't expect too much help or support from them.

Thx

[radish]

Ditto on the "770 gathering dust" comment...would be interested in any progress towards getting SP running on the older devices. I originally bought it to run the SC web UI, but then SBC happened!

[aubuti]

I've got the svn source of SqueezePlay running on my N800 and N810 (Maemo 4 - Diablo).

This is great news, especially as I recently acquired a N800 and a N770 through the generosity of another forum member. Could you possibly post a more detailed how-to? I'm comfortable with a Linux command line and doing simple things like running `make', following (very) clear instructions on lines to comment out, etc. Most of my experience is on debian and Ubuntu, so I hope it's not too big a leap to Maemo, but still I'm not familiar with the Maemo environment at all yet.

Some help on connecting the dots (such as exactly how to tweak the skins) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Richie]

I'd also like to get Squeezeplay running on my 770. Are there any instructions anywhere?

Thanks

Richard

[signor_rossi]

This isn't really running Squeezeplay on Maemo natively, but using Squeezeplay through VNC to make the N770 a 'light Controller' could also be useful to someone.
These are the steps I took so far:
1) Install tightvncserver on my (Ubuntu) box:
'sudo apt-get install tightvncserver'
2) Start it up once to get needed configuration files created: 'vncserver'
3) Set a password for VNC to get minimal security: 'vncpasswd'
4) Install openbox, which is needed to get a nice fullscreen decor-less SP
window: 'sudo apt-get install openbox'
5) Make vncserver run openbox at startup by adjusting '~/.vnc/xstartup'.
This is mine:

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
x-terminal-emulator -geometry
    80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
openbox-session &

6) If not already present create a file '~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh' to start Squeezeplay (don't forget to make it executable). Mine looks like this:

/home/squeeze/squeezeplay/build/linux/bin/squeezeplay.sh &

If I had installed Squeezeplay to /opt/ like jhong it would look like this:

/opt/squeezeplay/bin/squeezeplay.sh &

7) Make Sqeezeplay appear fullscreen and without window decorations. Create a file '~/.config/openbox/rc.xml' with these contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc">
  <applications>
    <application name="jive">
      <decor>no</decor>
      <fullscreen>yes</fullscreen>
    </application>
  </applications>
</openbox_config>

8) Make vncserver start at startup with the right resolution for the N770. Adjust '/etc/rc.local' like this (substitute YOUR_LOGIN with your username):

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.
sudo -b -H -u YOUR_LOGIN /usr/bin/vncserver :11 -geometry 800x480
exit 0

Hopefully I didn't miss any of the steps I took.
The biggest part is still missing, namely adjusting the Squeezeplay skin (WQVA Little Font) to the screen size and resolution of the N770. So far I only made it's window be 800x480 in resolution.

signorRossi.

[aubuti]

Grazie signorRossi. As you say, it's not running native, but it's worth a try when I get 'round to it.