USB connections with JEmplode on Linux

First off I'd like to thank Mike for providing us Linux users with such a useful piece of software, but it would be even more useful to me if I could use it over a USB connection as well as ethernet. I know this is somewhat of a long-standing problem with JEmplode, but after following the USB connection FAQ I still can't convince JEmplode to recognise my empeg over USB.

I'm using RedHat 9, and have installed JEmplode freshly using the installer file that includes the Java VM (Sun 1.4.0) provided at http://www.jempeg.org/installers-20b11/. I have also replaced the jemplode20.jar with the version 44 release. Following the serialusb-HOWTO I have installed the Java Communications API, and have also installed the version 1.4 RXTX serial and parallel libraries following the instructions on the RXTX website. Now, RXTX clearly is working as when I now run JEmplode I receive an error message from RXTX saying I need to be a member of the uucp group to run RXTX. As expected, JEmplode runs fine when I am the root user.

I've created the gnu.io.rxtx.properties file and listed the usb ports as /dev/usb/ttyUSB0:/dev/usb/ttyUSB1. These links do exist on my filesystem, so I presume they are the correct ones to use. However, on connecting the empeg to my laptop via the usb cable and turning on all the connection options on JEmplode (including serial connection), I receive the "No devices found" message. The USB connection appears to be working as the usbview program clearly lists the RioCar as a connected device, and I've tried attaching it via all of the laptops USB ports.

On a completely different topic I've noticed that using JEmplode with Sun Java 1.4.0 I can upload songs a directory at a time via the CTRL-D option fine, but uploading individual songs via the CTRL-N option doesn't work. The open file dialog appears, but after selecting a file and OK'ing it, the dialog disappears and nothing happens - no upload occurs. This problem doesn't exist with Sun Java 1.3.1, and I haven't tried other versions yet.

I honestly don't expect to find a solution to these problems, but if anyone could suggest something I'd greatly appreciate it! Hopefully it may be of use to others as well.

Oh, and another question while I'm at it. If I have created a soup playlist on the empeg using JEmplode will it automatically update this soup playlist when I upload music in the future that would potentially belong to the soup? If not is it possible to save the list of formulae that create the all of the soups on the empeg so that these soup playlists may be simply updated when I upload new music?

Thanks,
Ross

Is the empeg being recognised properly by the empeg USB driver in the kernel? It should know when you plug it in. Look in the system logs.

The best (by FAR) solution to this and similar issues, is for a certain un-named BBSer to get off his butt and finish what he started last year, namely a USB slave implementation on the player that emulates a network adapter.

That way, plug the Empeg USB into a host computer, and the Empeg pretends to be an ethernet adapter. So the host (Linux, Windows, Mac, ...) can simply send TCP/IP packets out "through it" to communicate with JEmplode, Hijack's webserver, etc..

Apparently This Person even had it mostly working before it got abandoned. It would really be nice for them to make their code available so that someone else could polish it up and get it going for the rest of us.

Cheers

heh

Yeah Mark... it would be SO cool to have this feature working.. speaking of that... i seem to rember you talking about using the IRDA port as netcardalso so one could actually use the IRDA port for something.... what is the future of this? - is there any posibillity that you could get the IRDA port actually working for transfering files ?

I believe that was yet another person.. should be easy, though, as I believe the kernel already knows how to do tcp/ip over IRDA.

But my other computers here don't do IRDA, so it doesn't interest me.

Cheers

Oh, that's a shame... this would be really cool ... especially in the car... i use my laptop as my primary computer, and i often wanted to be able to transfer a file or 2 to the player when i'm in the car.. anyone else able to take on this task ? ... danm i wish i knew how to write c++

Didn't somebody get this working already? It was under Linux though from what I remember so all the Windows people will be out of luck...

Empire the Empeg IrDA listener for Palantir would do this with little modification. Basically it just listens for OBEX objects, or files, that have a filename of palantir*.empeg. If the file does not match this pattern, it does nothing, but you could put in an else statement (on line 112) that would write the file out to a directory. Windows 2000 and I think XP come with OBEX built in, and there are OpenOBEX demo programs that beam files from Linux, so no additional software needed on the laptop. Post here when you've got your piece coded.

Additionally, when you use irattach, the kernel recognizes the IrDA port as a network device, and it even shows up in the player's About screen as having a MAC address, but no IP address.

Using the IrDA port of the Empeg for more than short amounts of time would be a major pain, unless you had some sort of mount to keep the device line-of-sight. I've detailed how I got a telnet program running over the IrDA port earlier on this BBS, but it was just too impractical to use. IrDA is good for something like Palantir, syncing your Palm device, or transferring short amounts of data, not as a wired ethernet replacement.

Yes, the kernel seems to be recognising the empeg. I've attached the relevant part of the log to this message.

Ross

You're definitely a little on your own here, because I never actually use USB ..... Is the gnu.io.rxtx.properties file in the exit/lib folder of the VM you are using? You might want to try setting up your serial connections in rxtx properties and do straight serial first -- there are a lot fewer things that can go wrong, and it will absolve rxtx from guilt. If you can't get serial going, you'll never get USB going.

Not sure what's up with the 1.4/1.3 change in accelerators. The accelators in the new versions will all be internationalized, and they're mostly rewritten, so maybe they'll work better when I actually do a jEmplode build.

Soups on the Empeg should stay up-to-date. Things potentially get weird if you switch between jEmplode and Emplode, but it's supposed to handle that too (it will rescan your soups at download-time and remove things that aren't supposed to be there anymore and add new ones that are)

ms

Thanks for your reply, Mike.

I installed the RXTX software for the VM that came with the JEmplode installer so that would be in the /jre/ folders in the JEmplode directory. At the moment that is the only VM installed on my system to keep things simple.

It would be nice to find some way to test RXTX without using JEmplode, but unfortunately my laptop, being so modern, doesn't have any serial ports! :-(

> Not sure what's up with the 1.4/1.3 change in accelerators. The accelators
> in the new versions will all be internationalized, and they're
> mostly rewritten, so maybe they'll work better when I actually do
> a jEmplode build.

I don't think the file upload problem was due to the accelerators, I just used the CTRL notation to describe which functions I was using. The same problem occurs if you use the toolbar buttons.

> Soups on the Empeg should stay up-to-date. Things potentially get
> weird if you switch between jEmplode and Emplode, but it's supposed
> to handle that too (it will rescan your soups at download-time and remove
> things that aren't supposed to be there anymore and add new ones
> that are)ms

That sounds pretty neat, I'll look forward to making use of that functionality soon. Even if it did automatically update I wasn't expecting it could handle changes by Emplode - not that I use Emplode much these days anyway.

Ross