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20041011 Monday October 11, 2004

More iPod working on Solaris 10

OK, so I got gtkpod working. Pretty good app. Nice and easy to use.

It wasn't too hard to build on Solaris 10, actually, but it didn't exactly work right out of the box either (i.e. not just 'configure; make; make install'). No big deal though. It just needed to be hacked up a little to get it running.

I started by downloading the latest release gtkpod-0.80-2 and found that I also needed to download and build libid3tag. So I grabbed libid3tag-0.15.1b and it built without any changes. Then I started to build gtkpod-0.80-2 and found that I needed to make a few changes, mostly minor.

A couple of the files ('clientserver.c' and 'file.c') make calls to flock() that really oughta be calls to fcntl() for Solaris. And in 'info.c' there's a call to 'df -k -P', where '-P' is supposedly POSIX output format. That extra argument causes problems (and is unnecessary) for Solaris, so I took it out. And in 'misc.c' the function called which() seemed to be causing me some problems (but this could just be a problem with my environment.) Not sure though, so... when in doubt, hack it out.

The only other things I had to do were also probably related to my environment. Couple minor changes in the makefiles: invalid compiler flag, some issues with duplicate/conflicting header files, and needing to add 'libnsl' and 'libsocket' in with the final link. No biggie. After all that was done, I was ready to play.

As I said above, this is a pretty good app. I didn't build it with any AAC support yet (see libmp4v2 though), so I can't listen to my handful of iTunes songs. (Plus there's that whole DRM issue, which I won't go into here.) But I am able to listen to all my MP3's (all ripped from CD's I own.)

(2004-10-11 18:07:11.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Comments:

Hi, can you send me a diff? Also, do you have any idea how we could identify whether we are compiling under SOLARIS and need that patch? Cheers, JCS.

Posted by Jorg Schuler on October 21, 2004 at 03:52 AM EDT #

I found it rather strange that gtkpod was using df -k to find out the available space at all. I turns out that the Java based myPod does the same thing. statvfs(2) which is part of the POSIX standard seems like a much better way to do that, rather than parsing the output of a command that was mean't for human consumption.

Posted by Darren Moffat on November 15, 2004 at 04:32 PM EST #

That's a good idea, Darren. I've passed your suggestion along to one of the 'gtkpod' developers and am testing a change I put together too. Thanks!

Posted by SteveJay on November 30, 2004 at 10:41 PM EST #

Hi, its great to hear that i can connect my iPod via Solaris 10's uprated 1394 drivers. Is there any chance that we will see the uprated 1394 framework under Solaris 9 at all?

Posted by John Benge on January 23, 2005 at 10:57 AM EST #

John, good question. People here are still trying to decide if there'll be another update release of Solaris 9 or not (there have already been seven). I queried one of the engineers who is involved in ongoing Solaris 1394 development. And I'd say that _IF_ there is another Solaris 9 update, it'll likely have 1394 updates (and more, of course). But it's still a big 'if' from what I can tell.

Posted by SteveJay on January 27, 2005 at 10:27 PM EST #

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