05 August 2005 ~ 10 Comments

Triple Play STB

Uncategorized

Triple-Play gadgets for your living room are starting to popup. This is the first I found impressive enough for a WOW sound effect, and it runs Linux. Must… get… one…

  • Ricardo

    Most STBs currently in the market run some version of embedded Linux, whether they admit it or not. A good equivalent to this particular model is i3micro’s 300 series (it has the same featureset), but the 100 and 200s run Linux as well.
    Most units by Aminocom are powered by Linux and busybox:

    [root@AMINET]# cat /proc/version
    Linux version 2.4.20 (build@build.aminocom.com) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release/MontaVista)) #1 XXX XXX XX 16:58:31 BST 2005
    [root@AMINET]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
    cpu : unknown (51510950)
    clock : 0MHz
    bus clock : 0MHz
    revision : 9.80 (pvr 5151 0950)
    bogomips : 251.49

    and some Kreatel units not only run Linux, but GTK and Mozilla as well:

    588 20:05:24.400 browser-manager(149) Note: Starting browser.
    589 20:05:24.449 browser-manager(148) None:
    590 20:05:24.450 browser-manager(148) None: GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to: No such user 1010.

    (I never thought I’d see these GLib warnings outside my desktop…)

    People might not realize it, but if the current trend holds, soon enough there will be some sort of Linux device in everybody’s home…

  • http://celso.arrifana.org Celso

    Yep. I have a very cool Linux sat receiver at home called Dreambox DM7000S that I use to browse the Skies for DVB streams, record mpeg2 steams directly to a 300Gb disk and just as a plain server for basic stuff (ie: samba server, sshd, vlc server). It’s barely based on a hacked 2.6 kernel with busybox and the dbox framework on top of it and the CPU is a low-end IBM PowerPC which enables me to compile stuff very easily directly from my Powerbook without cross-compiling.

    celso:~/Desktop$ telnet xxxxxxx.dyndns.org
    Trying xx.xxx.xxx.xxx…
    Connected to xxxxxxxx.dyndns.org.
    Escape character is ‘^]’.

    Welcome on your Dreambox! – Kernel 2.6.9 (16:10:01).

    This release is brought to you by “The_Hydra”
    ==========================================================
    dreambox login: root
    Password:

    BusyBox v1.00 (2005.02.11-15:27+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
    Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.

    ~ > uname -a
    Linux dreambox 2.6.9 #3 Fri Feb 18 11:07:49 EST 2005 ppc unknown
    ~ > cat /proc/cpuinfo
    processor : 0
    cpu : STB04xxx
    clock : 252MHz
    revision : 9.82 (pvr 4181 0952)
    bogomips : 250.88
    machine : Dream Multimedia TV Dreambox
    plb bus clock : 63MHz

  • Ricardo

    Damn, you just gave me a reason to buy a powerbook. Cross-compiling is a bitch :-D
    That one looks suspiciously like a PPC 405, I have a couple of those lying around at home (without HD, though. I tried using an external USB, but USB 1.1 is too slow for direct access to video).

    IMHO, for a multi-use server, the best embedded toy is still the Linksys WRT54G. The CPU is a bit worse than the PPC 405, but it compensates with better networking hardware… :-)

  • Ricardo

    They did. There’s an asterisk ipkg for OpenWRT ;)
    You can still find these units easily on FNAC for a reasonable price. I bought mine there a couple of months ago.

  • acidburn

    damn… what’s the default root password for aminet124?

  • anonym

    anyone know login for the Aminet 110 ????

  • http://czela.net majkl

    Aminet124

    login: root
    password: root2root

  • Maia

    Gostaria de saber de que zona do país é a “Jonas”. E pela linguagem utilizada não é preciso dizer mais nada. E não sou madeirense! Cordialmente

  • http://www.moviesmusicmp3s.com/?buy_legal_mp3s mp3′s for an mp3 player

    Hey you have a nice blog and some great stuff here. Been here a couple times and thought I should at least post something…

  • http://satandcable.com/content/starview-7-usb-lan-pvr-cable-recever-box Starview 7

    I’ve seen these being demoed a couple of weeks ago, and they’re not bad. However, their claim of being the first to market an STB..