puppy 1.4 out and about unslung 3.x in beta

Very few updates in the recent past, mainly due to birthdays, Christmas and flu.

Work on puppy has not stopped, in fact, puppy is now at version 1.4. I got sidetracked for a little while and collaborated on an EPG file format specification used to ingest 7 day EPG data to the Toppy. The result is a data converter that will convert JavaXMLTV object database to Topfield Guide Data (.tgd) file, which can then be uploaded to the Toppy using puppy and ingested by an EPG uploader TAP. This gives the user the ability to have a 7 day EPG uploaded to the Toppy.

It works well.

In the meantime, Unslung 3.x made it into beta. This means that the standard unslung firmware is now perfectly capable of supporting puppy out of the box. Users do not need to follow any special instructions for a puppy compatible NSLU2 install.

The other time consuming task has been answering questions from puppy users and potential users. Clearly the combination of NSLU2 and puppy is a great enabling technology with lots of potential. There are a lot of things that could be achieved, but I only have so much time on my hands.

The creation of puppy has been driven by my own needs and as soon as those needs are met, I tend to move on. I am quite comfortable with command line interfaces and shell scripts, so GUIs are very low on my list of priorities. (Not to mention that by the time I am done with my day job, I've had it up to here with designing and implementing GUIs :)

There's plenty of scope for other people to implement GUIs and other icing / usefull features on top of the work I have started. I would be very happy to co-operate with others to help them with whatever puppy related projects they may wish to undertake. After all, it will benefit everyone, including me. Interested developers should contact me - toppy at urbanec dot net

puppy 1.1 tagged.

The next beta installment has been tagged in CVS as PUPPY_1_1.

Once the change propagates to anonymous CVS, the unslung package will be updated and puppy 1.1 will be available for install to anyone with an NSLU2 running unslung firmware.

Changes from 1.0 to 1.1 include some internal cleanup of the code, implementation of delete and rename functions, device auto-detection, file permission setting for downloaded files, various packet tracing options, better error detection and reporting and code portability improvements.

Thank you to rwhitby and cazlar for their contributions / assistance.

more features added.

Today, puppy gained a delete implementation that works and a rename implementation that does not. The rename bug is a rather nasty one and causes the Toppy to completely destroy the source file. The checked in change has rename disabled and it will print a warning.

I have my suspicions about the cause of this. I think it is related to the byte swapping algorithm and packet size adjustments required by it. I will address this issue as soon as I have the time. This could also be causing issues seen by x86 users trying to use puppy on Linux 2.6 desktops.

There have been a few other internal changes to some of the USB protocol handling. In particular, the protocol packet size constraints are now easier to follow and will actually cause an error, rather than issuing a command with truncated payload. This is unlikely to affect any legitimate use, since the check will only come into effect if the combined length of all command arguments in a packet reaches about 64kB.

Puppy is approaching a 1.1 release. Once the rename bug is sorted out, puppy will be tagged as PUPPY_1_1 and a new beta package will be pushed.

troubleshooting enhancements.

puppy troubleshooting options have changed slightly.

-v now shows verbose tracing output, but does not dump protocol packets.
-p will print packet headers - this should be sufficient to observe protocol state issues.
-P will dump the entire packet contents, both as hex and ASCII. This output could use some prettyfication. Patches gladly accepted!

I also created a new IRC channel so that other puppy developers can get near real-time help. Join #puppy on irc.freenode.net.

puppy now in beta.

The alpha testing stage of puppy went well and puppy has gone from alpha to beta.

The puppy package has been added to the standard unslung package feed and can be installed simply by using ipkg install puppy

Please see the wiki for more information on what version of unslung firmware is required by puppy.

puppy unslung package in alpha.

It turns out that the issues with compiling puppy as an unslung package were related to compatibility issues between Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6. I have backported puppy to work with Linux 2.4, while still maintaining compatibility with Linux 2.6.

The changes have been committed back to SourceForge CVS repository. The CVS tag PUPPY_1_0 can be used to check out this initial version. The same tag will be used to build the puppy_1.0-1.ipk unslung package.

Alpha testers can build the puppy unslung package right now, by checking out the current version of unslung from CVS and then doing a make puppy-ipk. As soon as I have a couple of reports of success, I will add puppy to the normal unslung package feed. Once that is done, puppy will be available for installation to anyone interested.

I'll be updating the puppy wiki page with more explicit instructions shortly.

puppy unleashed.

The source code to puppy has been uploaded to the SourceForge CVS repository. Look for it at http://sf.net/projects/puppy

rwhitby started work on turning puppy into an unslung package, however there are some issues. I developed puppy using the OE cross-compiler and that works just fine. But when attempting to use the crosstool environment, as used for unslung packages, the compile process just blows up.

I'll take a look at the issues as soon as I can, but that may not be until the weekend. If anyone can help solve this issue, I'd be happy to accept patches. Please use the SourceForge facilities to send a patch.

Home for puppy found.

The name of the project is now set in stone. It is puppy. The new official home for the project is http://puppy.sf.net. The NSLU2-Linux project has kindly provided a whole new section on their wiki just for puppy. Special thanks must go to rwhitby for helping with all the administrative tasks.

The source code to puppy will be uploaded to the SourceForge CVS repository within the next week. It will be released under the GPL, but there are a few minor items to sort out first.

Puppy had quite a good work out over the last week and downloaded in excess of 100GB of data from my Toppy. All without any problems at all.