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