Joggler fun

Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
For those that don't have a clue what a joggler is.

They are on offer until the end of the month from O2 for £50. For that money you get the following hardware. Its certainly very good value for the hardware involved.

Anyway it comes with O2's own OS but thats not why I bought one :)

Mine is currently running the ubuntu Karmic Koala netbook remix.

joggler.jpg


joggler-netbook.jpg


Its running ssh by default so you can remote in and start poking around (mine is handling WPA2 wireless without any issues:
joggler@joggletop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 3.5G 1.9G 1.4G 59% /
udev 246M 272K 246M 1% /dev
none 246M 1.4M 245M 1% /dev/shm
none 246M 92K 246M 1% /var/run
none 246M 0 246M 0% /var/lock
none 246M 0 246M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda1 64M 11M 54M 17% /media/BOOTV13
Click to expand...
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU Z520 @ 1.33GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1333.000
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips : 2659.91
clflush size : 64
power management:

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 28
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU Z520 @ 1.33GHz
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
apicid : 1
initial apicid : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips : 2659.95
clflush size : 64
power management:
Click to expand...
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 503756 488720 15036 0 4792 217588
-/+ buffers/cache: 266340 237416
Swap: 0 0 0
Click to expand...
Only just started having a play but I'm sure I'll get plenty of fun out of the little device. I can confirm it plays standard PAL movies fine (streaming over the wireless using VLC on NFS for me) using around 25% CPU usage on both virtual cores.
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
tehehe. what dya think I've been doing the last few nights ;-)

I'm currently trying to just get ubuntu booting off the internal flash drive. I've essentially done linux installs and stuff on these sort of devices at work for the last few months anyway, although I've had jtag available if i did bork the bootloader, so am being a tad more careful with this one. Slowly learning the EFI shizzle.

... although I might have accidentally bought two of them, so still have a backup if all goes wrong!

They are pretty decent bits of kit for the price though. muchos impressed.

Am currently battling with mmc partitions atm.... yays :(
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
sucks to be you.

just goto your local o2 store. Theyll probably have them in stock.
 
Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
Had to get mine from the local shop as the online store was out of stock earlier in the week. Tempted to buy a second one also. If you do get anywhere with the EFI firmware then don't make me re-create the wheel and throw me some info :)

I'm tagging all the useful info I find on delicious so you can view it all here:
http://delicious.com/popular/joggler

You've probably seen it already but:
http://www.jogglerwiki.info/index.php?title=Using_the_internal_flash_to_run_Linux_(or_anything_else)


Contains all the info to hack the internal EFI booter and repartition for your own linux version.

I'm probably going to end up going down this route:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/TinyGentoo
and then
http://xbmc.org
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Ive already been working through the : http://www.jogglerwiki.info/index.php?title=Using_the_internal_flash_to_run_Linux_(or_anything_else) route.

Currently debootstrapping the little bugger with emdebian grip. I'm a debian user atm (everything at work runs that or ubuntu), so I'm going to stick with what I know!

Somewhere on it, theres a serial port, as if you look at the sum0 files under the efi partition it mentions to use that for terminal output. On the similar embedded board I'm developing at work, the serial port is like the main "unbrick" port, so I might go searching for that if I do brick it. Usually will give you actual access to the bootloader, rather than just their fancy o2 logo.

Although booting it up this morning, I don't seem to have bricked it yet even though I was playing at 1am last night rm-rfing the main filesystem! yays.

Is it just me, or does the o2 logo go slightly pixellated when you load it from the ubuntu USB stick image thats available?
 
Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
Wol said:
Somewhere on it, theres a serial port, as if you look at the sum0 files under the efi partition it mentions to use that for terminal output. On the similar embedded board I'm developing at work, the serial port is like the main "unbrick" port, so I might go searching for that if I do brick it. Usually will give you actual access to the bootloader, rather than just their fancy o2 logo.
Click to expand...

Cool, I suspect soldering will be required as I doubt there is actually a serial jack installed anywhere.

Is it just me, or does the o2 logo go slightly pixellated when you load it from the ubuntu USB stick image thats available?
Click to expand...
Not noticed that one mine, but then again I'm mostly remoting in via ssh anyway atm.

Quick tip for a bit of stability and some performance, create yourself a file based swap device i.e:
Code: 
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=256000
  mkswap /swapfile
  swapon /swapfile
  vim /etc/fstab
     add: /swapfile        swap                   swap    defaults 0 0
  echo "100" > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Add the above line to /etc/rc.local as well.

Also prelink and preload may help you with loading times.
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Heres one for you: Anyone know why theyre using ext based filesystems on the thing, rather than something more flash friendly like ubifs?
 
Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
Wol said:
Heres one for you: Anyone know why theyre using ext based filesystems on the thing, rather than something more flash friendly like ubifs?
Click to expand...

I assume thats down to EFI bootloader support. As long as you are prepared to boot your init file image from an ext3 device you should be able to use anything you have compiled into your kernel however. Quite interested in logfs myself.
 
ShifT

ShifT

In Cryo Sleep
I've been staying quiet, largely because I haven't got far with mine but also because I'm going down the Android route. Not happy with progress so far :(

In theory Android is perfect for a small touch screen device with limited processing power, however, performance is terrible because there's no GPU hardware support and everything (rastering) is running off the CPU. There's also the minor detail of having no physical buttons. The lack of a power button can surely be worked around but once the idle timer kicks in, it's impossible to wake up without a power cycle. However, not having a back button is galling. I've mis-keyed the onscreen keyboard a few times now and it's thoroughly irritating to know that the only way back involves another power cycle.

Bit more work needed there I think.

On the hardware front, my intention was to use the Joggler as a kitchen PC. Perfect for looking up recipes online and perhaps good for running a copy of the Sonos controller software. Wall mounting is preferable so that's going to mean a bit of physical hackery but then that should open up the possibility of installing a decent heatsink.
 
E

elDiablo

Guest
So the O2 website is sold out, currently, so going to the O2 near work today at lunch, which should be good! Assuming it's £50 and not £100... And assuming the store isn't sold out! Woo!
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
phone up before and reserve one? Thats what I did for the 2 stores near me. Also shows whether theyre sold out too. Theyre £50 until the end of the month according to their literature in store.

I tried android - couldn't get it to work, decided that it wasn't going to be good enough for what I wanted to do, so have rolled back to debian.....

.... and still can't get the bugger to start, so think im going to use the ubuntu stick ats a starting point and cut stuff out of it!

Wish I could just open it up and get at the debug port - would make life soooooo much easier!
 
E

elDiablo

Guest
So I was reading through the JogglerWiki, that Haven pointed us at, and saw a mention in the Additional USB Ports section that maybe you want to add Bluetooth connectivity. While browsing Scan's "Today Only"'s deals, I saw the Belkin Micradigital USB Bluetooth Dongle for only £2.33(inc VAT)! (Make sure you get it from the today only page in order to get it cheap).

Just thought I'd let people know about it if they ever wanted to grab one now incase of future additions!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top