dd if=/dev/zero of=fat.img bs=512 count=32000
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 fat.img
sudo mkdosfs -F16 /dev/loop0
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

Now you can mount fat.img to your favorite mountpoint, copy files to it, then unmount. After that, what you have to do is open it up in a hex editor, go to offset 0×100 (nothing should be there, don’t worry), and insert the string “FCSR Chishm FAT”, ensuring it is null-terminated. For write support, following this null-terminated string should be the start sectors for 4 SRAM overlays, then followed by each of their sizes (I have not tested this). If you just want a filesystem on the cart so you can access it over WMB (like me), you can flash the image to a cart now. Otherwise, any rom you wish to use should be padded so that the image will be aligned on a multiple of 512 bytes, then prepended to the image.

% envelope.tex
% Print a #10 envelope

\font\cmssa = cmss12
\font\cmssc = cmss14

%setup:

\parindent 0 pt\nopagenumbers\parskip 10 pt
\hsize 9.5 in\vsize 3.25 in
\voffset 1.25 in
\cmssc

%document:

FROM-NAME

FROM-STREET ADDRESS

FROM-CITY, STATE, \ ZIP

\vskip .4 in\parindent 3.5 in

TO-NAME

TO-STREET ADDRESS

TO-CITY, STATE, \ ZIP
\end

Compile with:

tex envelope.tex; dvips -t landscape -m envelope.dvi

Then you can print with cupsdoprint or your favorite PostScript printing application. The envelopes should be inserted landscape-style, face up, open edge on the right side, in the center of the feed tray with all other paper removed and the guide tabs adjusted to fit the height of the envelope. The source TeX file is also available here.

avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, char**)’:
avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp:83: error: request for member ‘codec_type’ in 
    ‘pFormatCtx->AVFormatContext::streams[i]->AVStream::codec’, 
    which is of non-class type ‘AVCodecContext*’
avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp:92: error: cannot convert ‘AVCodecContext**’ 
    to ‘AVCodecContext*’ in assignment
avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp:105: error: ‘struct AVCodecContext’ has 
    no member named ‘frame_rate’
avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp:105: error: ‘struct AVCodecContext’ has 
    no member named ‘frame_rate_base’
avcodec_sample.0.4.9.cpp:106: error: ‘struct AVCodecContext’ has 
    no member named ‘frame_rate_base’

I’ve created a patch as well as a fixed example for the code. I’m not entirely sure about commenting out the frame rate correction hack, but those frame rate variables are no longer members of the AVCodecContext struct.

Also, for compiling under Debian, the recommended usage is not to change the include directives, but to use:

g++ `ffmpeg-config --cflags` -o filename filename.cpp 
    `ffmpeg-config --libs avformat --libs avcodec`

Sadly though, the device is far from perfect. The interface is pretty clumsy, and if you want to use the device in USB mass storage mode only without their Windows-only transfer utility, you lose the music database functionality and quite a few other things. If you have a directory structure like:

Funk/
 Funk.mp3
Funk Rock/
 Funk Rock.mp3
-Funk- Rock/
 -Funk- Rock.mp3

Then play Funk.mp3, it will just play it over and over instead of moving on to Funk Rock.

Worst of all, they’re blatantly violating the GPL (the firmware uses a modified Linux kernel, the main application embeds code from the GNU fileutils, and the firmware also uses dosfstools). I’ve requested the source from them, but I’m not too optimistic based on my experience in the past with these sorts of things (I’m the OP in the avsforum thread, and the Duke website which is no longer there was mine). Hilariously enough, the mPack apparently uses a Sigma Designs EM85XX.PVP chipset. Does Sigma distribute these things with a mandate that the manufacturers ignore and violate the GPL as much as possible?

All of this information is now being pulled from our LDAP server, which is pretty snazzy. You can get the patch here. So now, I have LDAP working for:

• user logins to Linux
• Samba PDC functionality (shares the same home directory etc. as their Linux account)
• company-wide addressbook (works in mail clients, as well as the copier/scanner machines)
• logins to intranet web apps (including the very cool Trac)
• Jabber authentication, rosters, and vCards
• postfix and Courier IMAP for mail handling
• pureftpd authentication

All in all, kind of a hassle to get going, but definitely worth it. There should be a free Linux distro that assumes you want to do this kind of stuff by default. Novell OES may come close, but it’s non-free in both the monetary sense and in that it relies on the closed-source eDirectory.

c2s.xml:

• Disable user registration.
• Change <host> in the LDAP section to the appropriate host.
• Hopefully you have your server resolving to a domain name, even if it’s an internal one such as “companyserver” (if you don’t, you should set it up now. You wouldn’t want to have your users showing up as username@192.168.100.1 or something). In the <local> section, set up a new realm such as <id realm='company'>companyserver</id>.
• Now that you’ve set up a new realm, you need to add an LDAP basedn for searching in that realm. In the LDAP section, add <basedn realm='company'>ou=people,dc=company,dc=com</basedn>, adjusting for your specific directory layout.
• There seem to still be some issues with LDAPv3 in the version of jabberd2 (2.0s3) that’s currently in my distro. Setting jabberd2 to use LDAPv3, slapd refuses the connection with “requested protocol version not allowed”. I had to leave v3 commented out and alter my slapd.conf to allow v2 connections.
• Change the backend module in the authreg section to “ldap”.

sm.xml:

• Turn on user auto-create by uncommenting it.
• Change the sm id to the realm you set up earlier. In the example’s case, this would be <id>companyserver</id>.

Now you should be able to restart jabberd2 and have users login as username@companyserver, authenticated against your LDAP directory.

If only I’d had this book beforehand:

Update: Switched back to Beagle 0.0.8 so it would work with inotify, and it’s working much better now. And with the Firefox plugin provided by the Beagle project, it looks like it pretty much already does what I was looking for. Also got other things like mplayer, acroread 7, etc. up and running. Also got suspend/resume working again, however, my consoles are still messed up after running video-post. Suspend-to-disk appears to lock up completely as well.

dd if=/dev/zero of=diskimage.img bs=1M count=512
losetup /dev/loop0 diskimage.img
mke2fs /dev/loop0
mkdir mounted
mount /dev/loop0 mounted
debootstrap sid mounted/ http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/

You should now have a nice base Debian install to diskimage.img. Clean up your mounts with:

umount mounted
losetup -d /dev/loop0

Then you can launch qemu with a command like:

qemu -hda diskimage.img -kernel /path/to/bzImage -append 
  "root=/dev/hda sb=0x220,5,1,5 
  ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe ide4=noprobe ide5=noprobe"

Ta-da! Once you’re done, make sure you shutdown with “shutdown -h now” before closing out qemu, or you’ll probably have to mount the image to loopback again and e2fsck it manually. You can also mount the image any time you’d like with “mount -o loop diskimage.img mounted” and muck about in the filesystem, or even act like you’re on it locally by using the chroot command after you’ve mounted it. If you get an error like:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

when you try to boot, make sure you have ext2 support built in to your kernel, also set CONFIG_IDE, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDE, and CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEDISK to be built in as well.

$ /usr/bin/cli --debug /usr/share/dotnet/monodevelop/bin/MonoDevelop.exe
Creating DefaultWorkbench

(MonoDevelop:9543): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading icon: Failed to open file 
'/home/data/resources/icons/Icons.SharpDevelopIcon': No such file or 
directory

I tried using the Ubuntu package (monodevelop_0.5.1-3_i386, one revision higher than the monodevelop_0.5.1-2_i386 provided by Debian), but it does the exact same thing (except the executable is placed in a different structure under /usr/lib/monodevelop, and the /usr/bin/monodevelop script uses mono instead of cli). Doing something silly like copying the /usr/share/dotnet/monodevelop/data directory to /home makes the icon error go away, but MonoDevelop still does not start. I even tried rebuilding the monodevelop package with the new mono install, but it does the same thing. I suspect it’s related to this bug.

Update: It has randomly decided to start working again.