Select Default Sound Card

First you will need to run the following command to install asoundconf
sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk

After this change your default sound card under System → Preferences → Default Sound Card to PulseAudio. After this you should be able to listen to multiple audio sources at once.

Installation Procedures for Ubuntu Intrepid:

1. If you have Avant Window Navigator installed you may want to install it, or disable it from starting at boot, to uninstall it do the following: sudo apt-get remove avant-window-navigator*
2. Optional: If you want to use GNOME Do without Compiz then you can install Xcompmgr, a simple composite window manager. This works well if you have an ATI video card and are experiencing Compiz related video playback issues.sudo apt-get install xcompmgr
3. Add the software repositories for GNOME Dosudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'sudo sh -c 'echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
4. Install the key for the repository (optional but recommended)gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /tmp/gnome-do.keyring --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv A5D19FDCAA6ABB440CD3464628A8205077558DD0gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /tmp/gnome-do.keyring --export --armor A5D19FDCAA6ABB440CD3464628A8205077558DD0 | sudo apt-key add -rm /tmp/gnome-do.keyring
5. Update and install GNOME Dosudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install gnome-do gnome-do-plugins
6. Open up gnome do, by going to Applications → Accessories → GNOME Do. When GNOME Do launches, click the drop down arrow in the top right hand corner and select Preferences. Open up the appearance tab and change change the Theme to ‘Docky’

Additional instructions for Xcompmgr

• If you are using Xcompmgr instead of Compiz you must enable Xcompmgr during statup, you can do this by adding it the Startup Programs in the Sessions window. If you are not sure on how to do this follow the instructions below substituting the gnome-do command with xcompmgr.

Add GNOME Do as a Startup Program

1. Go to System → Preferences → Sessions
2. Select Add on the Statup Programs tab.
3. Search through the list and ensure that it is not already in there. If not continue, otherwise you are done!
4. Enter a Name such as GNOME Do, for the command enter gnome-do, and optionally enter a relevant comment.
5. Optionally reboot to ensure everything is working as expected.

Hints:

• Adjust the size of Docky by holding your mouse over the center divider until the double headed arrow appears and click and drag to resize.
• Right click the purple gear icon to enable some additional features for Docky, such as ‘Advanced Indicators’ also known as Advanced Window Indicators. These are the little dots under the window icons on Docky, the Advanced Indicators will tell you how many windows of the same application you have open (one or two dots). Unfortunately when you open three or more windows of the same application Docky’s Advanced Indicator will remain at two dots.
• Right-click any application icon with more then one window open and Docky will give you a context menu with a list of the windows along with the normal extra options
• Right-click any icon to get a context menu with extra options.

Gripes:

• Why is there not a context menu for the Trash Bin, allowing you to empty the Trash? This has been added in Gnome-Do version 0.8.1.
• When you left-click an application with multiple windows open all windows are Maximized or Minimized, why not show a context menu displaying the different windows that are available?

1. Make sure you have build essentials installedsudo apt-get install build-essential
2. Change into a working directory, I used the following:cd /tmp
3. Download the latest snapshot wget http://www.alsa-project.org/snapshot/?package=alsa-driver
4. Extract the drivers you just downloadedtar -jxvf alsa-driver-*.tar.bz2
5. Change into the newly extracted directorycd alsa-driver-*
6. Time to compile the source, do the following./configure if all goes well this command should end without any errors.
7. Run make (this may take a little while depending on your machines processing power)make
8. Let’s install the driverssudo make install
9. Finally run the following script to create necessary devicessudo ./snddevices
10. You may also want to run the alsaconf command and configure your default sound card.
11. All done, reboot!

If you don’t hear any sound after you reboot, adjust your sound levels in gnome volume control (run the command gnome-volume-control or by double clicking on the speaker icon). Adjust your Master and PCM levels. Don’t forget about the Speaker level on the far right, adjust this also!

This all stemmed from wanting to be able to develop and compile C and C++ programs for the NGW100. At first I tried to compile PHP and Lighttp using the instructions found on Wildan Maulana’s blog entitled Compiling PHP & lighttpd for avr32, but it was less then ideal. After some experimentation and Googling, I discovered that with Buildroot, I could build my own custom Kernel that included all the software that I required.

I first compiled with dropbear SSH which lacks SCP (Secure Copy) and not OpenSSH but soon realized that ProFTPD was a huge pain in the rear, transfers were unreliable (especially to the SD card), so I recompiled with OpenSSH support.

Useful Information:

• Root Password: roota
• HTTP Directory: /www/pages
• Both NICs have DHCP client enabled, and Iptables has been disabled.

Additional Daemons Installed:

• lighttpd
• SQLite
• PHP
• Python
• OpenSSH w/ SCP support

Version Information:
uname -a
Linux ngw.example.net 2.6.27.6.atmel.1 #1 Fri Jan 16 15:21:34 EST 2009 avr32 unknown

Installation Instructions:

UPDATE: I have uploaded the images to a new faster server. I have also compiled the root file system with support for Lighttpd (w/ OpenSSL), PHP (w/ OpenSSL), and SQLite per special request. It also includes OpenSSH and Nano.

With Python and no OpenSSL: avr32-linux.tar.bz2
With OpenSSL Support: avr32-openssl.tar.bz2

You will need to format an SD Card using the ext2 filesystem, which will need to be done from a Linux machine, First unmount the device, then use the following command to format it:

sudo mkfs.ext2 /dev/yourDeviceHere

After this you can just extract the avr32-linux.tar.bz2 archive to the root of the SD Card using the following command (replace /media/sdcard with the mount point of your SD card):

cd /media/sdcard
sudo tar -xvf /path/to/avr32-linux.tar.bz2

Insert the SD Card into your NGW100 and boot it up, using a serial console press the space key to abort the normal boot sequence, then enter the following:

Print your current environment variables:
Uboot> printenv

Make a note of the current settings, that way if you want to boot from the onboard flash memory at some point, you will be able to change your settings back. You can also find the default settings on this page.

No lets change the uBoot environment variables to boot from the SD Card:

Uboot> askenv bootcmd
Please enter 'bootcmd': mmcinit; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x10300000 /uImage; bootm 0x10300000
Uboot> set bootargs 'console=ttyS0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait'
Uboot> saveenv

Now you should be able to press the reset button and boot into Linux, congratulations!

The NGW100 uses the sysfs interface to control the on-board LEDs. The interface is located in the following directory:

/sys/class/leds

If you run ls for the above directory you should get the list of the following files and folders:

/sys/class/leds/sys # ls
brightness device power subsystem trigger uevent

We are mostly interested in the brightness and trigger files. The brightness enables you to either switch on an LED or switch it off (We know that in a computer that a binary 1 means on and a binary 0 means off), which can be done in the following manner:

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/a/brightness
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/a/brightness

Now onto more usefull applications for the LEDs. We can set the LEDs to be triggered upon system events. For this we are interested in the trigger file. Lets see what the trigger file contains:

/sys/class/leds/sys # cat trigger
none mmc0 timer [heartbeat] default-on

In the above output we know that the trigger is currently set to heartbeat since it is enclosed in square brackets. We can easily change this to the SD card slot, that way we have an SD activity LED, using the following code:

echo "mmc0" > /sys/class/leds/a/trigger

In the above example we changed the LED labeled A on the NGW100 to be triggered by activity on the SD card.

So I will admit originally I did not want to totally re-flash the device but ran into some problems when I was trying to develop applications for the included version of Linux. This all started when I wanted to compile PHP to run on the device, after cross compiling on my desktop I was getting errors such as the following when trying to run PHP:

can't resolve symbol 'atextit'

Which I later realized that there were some differences between the library on the device and the library in my Buildroot environment. So I decided that I must upgrade the installed version of Linux to the same version I compiled PHP with. Well this was a confusing task, the documentation was sparse and hard to understand. So I am documenting my process here.

Things you need:

• Linux (Ubuntu is used here)
• JTAGICE programmer (optional)
• Tftp Server (preferred)
• Compiled AVR32 Buildroot Environment
• Serial Port and Cable
• Serial Port Terminal Program (HyperTerminal or GtkTerm)

First, you must compile Buildroot, you can find instructions on how to do that on Atmel’s Buildroot site: http://www.atmel.no/buildroot/. If this is your first time using Buildroot or you are not too familiar with it, be sure to read that documentation throughly, as it tells you where to find the image files (buildroot-avr32-v2.*/binaries/atngw100/). We are interested in the rootfs.avr32.jffs2-root and rootfs.avr32.jffs2-usr files. If you have a JTAGICE programmer then you would also be interested in the u-boot.bin file, which you would use to upgrade your uBoot.

Secondly, setup your tftp server and host the rootfs.avr32.jffs2-root file on it. Here is a good tutorial on setting up atftp on Ubuntu Linux.

You can now update your NGW100 using TFTP, here are the commands you will need to use.

Disable write protection and erase the flash memory:
Uboot> protect off 0x20000 0x7EFFFF
Uboot> erase 0x20000 0x7EFFFF

Download the firmware from the TFTP server:
Uboot> set ipaddr 10.0.0.100
Uboot> set tftpip 10.0.0.1
Uboot> tftp 0x90000000 rootfs.avr32.jffs2-root

Copy to flash (this will take about 30-60 seconds):
Uboot> cp.b 0x90000000 0x20000 $(filesize)
Copy to Flash... done

Turn write protection back on:
Uboot> protect on all
Uboot>

Lastly reboot and cross your fingers, chances are it will fail with the following error:

find_inode failed for name=uImage
load: Failed to find inode
### JFFS2 LOAD ERROR<0> for uImage!
## Booting image at 10200000 ...
Bad Magic Number
Uboot>

This happens because in the most recent version of uBoot, the uImage moved from /boot/uImage to the root of the file system, you could recompile with it in the correct location, but there is an easier way. Enter the following at the uBoot command prompt:

setenv bootcmd 'fsload 0x90400000 /boot/uImage;bootm'

Everything should be working well now, except you will see some more strange errors during boot, this is because the /usr directory has not been updated and was compiled for the old OS version. So we must update the /usr directory with the new directory image. Use the following commands:

We must stop all running services that are running from within the /usr directory so we can unmount the directory. There is no quick and easy way of doing this other then just using ps to get a list of running daemons from within the /usr directory:

ps | grep /usr

Then we must kill those running daemons, you can do this the following way, replacing pid with the id you retrieved from the above command:

kill pid

Then try to unmount the directory:
umount /usr

If you are still unable to unmount the /usr directory then use the which command on the process name you retrieved from using the ps command. This will locate any other processes that are running out of the /usr directory. Then just kill them and try running umount again.

Once you have successfully unmounted the /usr directory, we can proceed with erasing the flash:

flash_eraseall /dev/mtd3

Now you will need to copy the rootfs.avr32.jffs2-usr file to a memory card or use wget to download it from a Http server. You can just put it into the /tmp directory:

Replace 10.0.0.100 with the IP of your server:
cd /tmp
busybox wget http://10.0.0.100/rootfs.avr32.jffs2-usr

And finally write the image to the flash memory:
dd if=/mnt/rootfs.avr32.jffs2-usr of=/dev/mtd3 bs=1056

Reboot and everything should load fine. I did notice that the SYS led now flashes instead of remaining on, not sure why. The blinking sys LED turns out to be the heartbeat of the system, when the board is idle it flashes slowly and when running a CPU intensive task it flashes rapidly proportional to the CPU load.

The NGW100 Development Board

When trying to transfer files to the NGW100 I realized that the FTP server running on the device is very finicky especially when transferring files onto a media card. For this reason, I decided it would be better to mount a NFS share onto the NGW100.

You may have noticed that mounting an NFS share on the NGW100, the following does not work, resulting in an error:

mount -t nfs server:/data/public /media/public
mount: mounting server:/data/public on /media/public failed

You must specify the following options in order to mount a NFS share on the NGW100, and it should successfully mount the NFS share.

mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=2,nolock server:/data/public /media/public

Thinking of different ways to attack this problem, I thought of possibly burning the CD directly from within the script, but then quickly ruled out that option thinking it would be to complicated and require additional software to be installed. I knew my target audience was Linux users, specifically Ubuntu, since this functionality is already available in iTunes and Windows Media Player, not to mention that I am a huge fan of Ubuntu.

The Deliverables:

This script takes a pls file and converts it to a Brasero Data CD project, for use in MP3 cd players, I have not tested it in Windows as it was developed for Linux.

Download the script: plsToBrasero.py

To use the script the user must supply two command line arguments the first the input file which is a playlist file generated by songbird using the export playlist plugin.

Sample:
python plsToBrasero.py input.pls output.burn