Creating my own binary :)

What a wealth of information I came across today. I have to give credit to klootje for steering me in that direction.

http://rtd1261.wikidot.com/start

Apparently there are already devices out there that are very similar to this one, and hacks that support those devices.

First, I wanted to find out if some of the binaries on that site would work at all. So from the tweaks page, I copied the FTP binaries out there and set it up. It worked like a charm.

So I continued to explore through the page when I came across a link that was no longer valid on the site but it put me in the right location. This was on the linux page. But here is the critical link:

http://www.uclibc.org/downloads/binaries/

In there are the precompiled toolchains necessary for developing DIRECTLY ON THE DEVICE. The best way to do this:

Download the one called system-image-mipsel.tar.bz2 and extract the image-mipsel.ext2 file. I used WinRar. Put the .ext2 file on the root of the NTFS drive. Now telnet into the drive.

cd /tmp
mkdir root_fs
mount -o loop /usr/local/etc/hdd/volumes/HDD1/image-mipsel.ext2 root_fs

What that does is mount the image from your hard drive.

chroot /tmp/root_fs

Presto. Now you can write C programs, compile them and run them. They didn't have any success doing this with the other multimedia players, but this worked beautifully on the Iomega drive. I wrote the basic "hello world" program in C, compiled it, made it executable, exited the chroot, and ran it. It displayed exactly what I wanted.

Cntrl-d to exit the chroot, by the way. gcc is the C compiler in that environment.

A whole new world to explore now. I believe many of the things found on that wiki site are going to be almost immediately usable on this drive. I have blogged all I'm going to blog on this device for the time being, as it will be much more beneficial to log this information into the wiki.