LINUX on miniplayer

mfb

200Mhz ARM9, my brother has the same architecture and clockspeed in his NAS. He hacked it to run his webserver, torrent tracker and automatic bittorrent downloader. All running on Linux.

048135

OK i get your point you can stop having a go at me. i was just thinking. linux firmware is so much more customizable, so you can redesign the gui completely. and i didnt mean ubunto, if an ipod can handle linux, why can the meizu miniplayer not?

dravik

200Mhz will not say the speed... because you don't know what he can do in 1Mhz...

jbernardo

The meizu could run linux - the same way a zaurus pda, a motorola phone, or a wizpy mp4 player do. What is needed:

• Full hardware specs - cpu instruction set, memory maps, asic I/O ports, etc.
• Firmware specs - image format, how to generate it, how to sign it, etc.
• Brainpower - interested people that can port a kernel and create a framebuffer implementation based on the specs. If that is achieved, then all the other parts are easy - cross-compilers, id3v2 taglibs, ogg/vorbis decoder libs, mp? decoder libs, media players, etc. everything exists already and can be built for small/embedded devices.

The first two can be provided by meizu or reverse engineered. The third - I'm not a kernel hacker, but maybe we can get one interested long enough if the specs exist.

mfb

I know, but these ARM9 processors are not as diverse in those differences as x86 processors.

stranded

why would you want to run linux on it? for fun?

it wouldn't work in any good way at all

Fergal

Well, actually, if the power was there, having Linux as the operating system running in the background and having a customized media player running as the front end, you could, theoretically, make your M6 play virtually every audio format and every video format there is.

Lexridge

I think the general confusion on this thread is that Linux is Ubuntu (or similar), but it's not. Linux is an extremely customizable OS kernel that can be currently ran (or easily ported) on any CPU in existence today. I have compiled many Linux kernels, for x86 CPUs and for other embedded CPUs, such as Broadcom and ARM. While it would not be Rocket Science to port Linux to use the M6 hardware, it would be rather silly to do so. The Rockbox project is already in existence, and uses the same license as Linux, the General Public License (GPL).

Why re-create the wheel? Perhaps as a group we could take donations in order to send an M6/M6SE to the developers of Rockbox, in order to help them develop RockBox for the M6.

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dravik

I like the idea... but are there realy enough people who will/can donate? i mean myself for example... I don't have paipall or something like that...

048135

I totally agree. i am not a kernel hacker either, but if we have enough people we can all work on this together. having linux will be an amazing advantage. please can all the experienced specialist help, if we have linux, there could be hope. thanx