First of all, I'd like to thank all three individuals for contributing funds towards the project. The amount of money collected from donations is minimal. Not quite enough to pay for 50% of an NSLU2. Donations are of course optional, but encouraged. Any amount will be accepted.
Thanks!
Now, onto the main news...
I have finally managed to implement workarounds for bugs in the Topfield USB implementation. Puppy 1.11 is the result of several months worth of troubleshooting, reverse engineering, USB bus snooping and other tedious work. It may have not been this difficult if Topfield had cooperated, however I could not get them to even acknowledge my emails or return phone calls.
This release has undergone rigorous testing, including the transfer of several hundred gigabytes of data and transfers of over 4,000 files in both directions. Most of the testing was performed on a Linux workstation running 2.6.12-gentoo-r7 and ehci_hcd. The tests involved uploading the data to a Topfield TF5000PVRt and then downloading them again. To verify data integrity, the md5sums of the original files and the downloaded files were compared. Some testing was also done on an NSLU2 running OpenSlug 2.5 beta.
This release changes the way turbo transfers are handled. Previous versions allowed the -t switch to enable turbo transfers only during put and get commands. The new version removes the -t switch and introduces the turbo command. The turbo command takes either 0 (zero) or 1 (one) as the argument to disable or enable turbo mode. Once turbo is enabled, it will persist until explicitly turned off.
The USB timeout has also been increased so that puppy does not timeout when the hard disk needs to spin up. While this is sufficient in most instances, there are still occassions where the timeout is not long enough. For example, deleting a directory with 2,000 files can take almost a minute. This will cause a timeout.
