[Gc-linux-devel] Status

[Michael S. <mi...@c6...>]

Hi!

I'm very busy with other stuff at the moment, but I could have a look 
at GC Linux again today. The network driver seems to be perfect now 
(thanks hampti!), we can mount root from NFS - so I could boot a full 
Mandrake 9.1 and run some full-blown glibc apps like mpg123 and 
mplayer.

*** Audio driver ***

Both apps had the same problem with kirin's audio driver: Every chunk 
of PCM data seems to be repeated  about 3 times, i.e. the speed is too 
slow, but the pitch is correct. Can anyone else contribute their 
experiences?
Looks somehow as if the interrupt handler is too slow and the audio 
unit just keeps repeating, until the new data is ready. Just a guess. 
Any idea?

*** MPlayer ***

MPlayer works quite nicely (640x384 DivX at 100% speed with (buggy) 
sound disabled; sound enabled would slow everything down, because video 
would sync to too-slow sound), but the colours are off. MPlayer seems 
to try to encode the pixels itself and doesn't really use the 
framebuffer driver. Workarounds?

*** X Window ***

X Window also works quite nicely. I have nothing to move the mouse 
pointer with, and the colours are wrong as well, but a remote Gnome 
session worked very well. See new screenshot on website (about to be 
uploaded).

*** Keyboard driver ***

I have both the Tototek and the Datel keyboard adapter now, and I 
experienced that it could even get worse. The Tototek adapter has some 
very weird mappings, and quite some bad bugs - the Datel adapter 
doesn't seem to have any bugs, but quite some dead keys, and very very 
strange and Tototek-incompatible mappings. I'll investigate this 
further. We might need a kernel command line to specify what adapter 
the driver is supposed to support - fixing it with keyboard layouts 
afterwards is probably no good idea, because we would need two versions 
of every local layout then, for Tototek and Datel.

*** Other apps ***

I tried running VICE (C64 Emulator) on the GameCube's X Window session, 
but it froze the machine. I also tried to compile MPlayer directly on 
the GC, and GCC aborted. Most probably this is all due to out of memory 
problems. I had no swap. I find it really interesting that DivX/MPEG4 
works so well with only 24 MB, because I remember DivX 4 always said it 
needed at least a 64 MB machine to play movies...

By the way, Steve_- is working on a small Debian-based NFS base system 
that will be available for everyone.

   Michael