Development of Rockbox Utility

Tasks

Open Tasks in the tracker

Milestone 1: be on par with the old wx version

What?	Status?
Device detection	sansapatcher detection untested
Rockbox installation	done
Bootloader installation	done, needs testing
Font installation	done
Doom files installation	done
Theme installation	done
Talk file generation	done (only basic functionality)
Voice file installation	done
Uninstallation	done
Manual view	done: downloading to the device (no destination selection)
Complete Installation	done, code could be improved
Small Installation	done, code could be improved
Portable installation	done (only working if built as static binary)
Proxy setup	system proxy only working on linux (http_proxy environment variable)
Download cache	needs testing
I18N	support added, translations missing

Milestone 2: further enhancements

What?	Status?
uninstallation / install info	done
1st installation detection	if no / no valid user configuration is found, display a warning and open the configuration dialog
Device detection	use USB PIDs for detection linux (using libusb), windows (setupapi based)
Proxy	support "system proxy" setting on windows (registry values used)
L10N support	we have I18N already, extend it to do real L10N
Mountpoint resolving on mac	done
Talk file generation	support festival and the sapi scripts from svn; autodetect binaries; find a way to not make the progress window flicker; add option to generate talk files for directories only; incorporate sapi vbs scripts ; add option to only voice certain file types
improving screenreader support	maybe add a drop downmenü with all install/uninstall options from the main tabs. / findout why jaws and other screenreaders have problems reading titles of QTabwidget. -> Its a bug in Qt, i reported it to Trolltech, and it will be fixed in future Qt versions (fixed in Qt 4.4.0-beta1).
General	Code clean up
Better Progress Window	console version needs implementation - in Work
Console commandos for rbutil	needs implementation - in Work
backup of installation prior to installing	rbutil now asks if you want to backup before installing a new Build
clean orphan files	could be done by automatically performing an uninstallation before updating
install info cleanup	possibility to wipe all files that are marked as outdated in the info window / all files that don't match a specific (read: the current) version)
builtin rbspeex and sapi.vbs	The rbspeex encoder should be built in, and the Sapi.vbs schould be in the resourcefile for windows
voice file creation	needs the servers to provide the features file for every player

Milestone 3: additions / ideas

Some of the following could be implemented with plugins. -- Qt supports plugins, but it hasn't figured out how to make use of that. Its also unclear which functionality should go into plugins.

How To Compile

You have to have Qt Version 4.3.0 or higher installed. Then you run the command qmake and then make in the rbutilqt folder. Depending on your installation the qmake binary of Qt4 might be called qmake-qt4. On linux and mac you'll also need libusb (including the development headers).

Notes:

• the build defaults to a release build which has debugging output (even the console) disabled. To create a debug build run qmake with the config option "dbg", i.e. the following way: qmake -config dbg
• you can make the build output much more silent by adding the configuration "silent". The easiers way is to add -config silent to the qmake call (you can add multiple -config switches, in case you also want to enable debugging output), or add the line CONFIG += silent to the project file.
  • Note that there is a bug in Qt/Windows which prevents this from working. You can simply fix this by adjusting the path delimiter in mkspecs/features/resources.prf below the Qt installation directory -- the delimiter in the line naming rcc.exe needs to be a slash, not a backslash.
  • you can also define QMAKE_RCC to the correct binary using slashes.
  • if you don't have Qt in your PATH (i.e. calling qmake.exe using a full path) make sure to use /'s in the path. Otherwise make will fail.
• Qt 4.3.3s qmake has a bug (at least on windows) which generates wrong makefiles. Comment out the UI_DIR entrys in the .pro file, as a hotfix.
• There is now a Makefile target "install" on non-windows platforms. It seems as it gets confused with the file install.cpp, but you can use the internal target "install_target" instead. This will only install the binary (to /usr/local/bin), language files are not handled yet. Unless you want to use translations you don't need to install anything else from the build.

Compiling on Windows

• You need the following packages installed (additionally to Qt itself)
  • MinGW. You need a recent version (current is 5.1.4), the package offered for installation by Qt is not sufficient. You should append the bin folder of the MinGW installation in your PATH variable.
  • msys. librbspeex.a requires sed which is not part of MinGW. As for MinGW itself, append the bin folder to your PATH.
  • Building using Visual Studio isn't supported -- rbutil uses some C99 features VS doesn't implement.

Compiling on Mac OS X

• Download the Qt source and uncompress it. I used qt-mac-opensource-src-4.3.0
• Run ./configure -universal -sdk /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk
• Run make followed by (as root) make install

You can then build rbutilqt by typing (in the rbutilqt source directory) /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.3.0/bin/qmake followed by make

If you want to statically link rbutil with Qt (i.e. to build versions for distribution), add -static to the configure options.

An alternative to static linking is to use the instructions on http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/deployment-mac.htm to include the frameworks in the application bundle. This method has the benefit of allowing plugins to be included too and also means that a static build of Qt is not required.

For deployment on mac, there is a "osx_deploy.sh script. It expects Qt as framework. So dont built Qt statically.

Notes: I had an error regarding when compiling Qt related to missing pq_* functions. I fixed this by disabling PostgreSQL support - adding "-no-sql-psql" to the ./configure line.

More advice for compiling on the Mac is available here - http://doc.trolltech.com/qtjambi/com/trolltech/qt/platform-notes-mac.html

Statically Compiling on Linux

For building the static binary the following configuration was used: ./configure -prefix /usr/local/qt4.3.1-static/ -release -static -fast -no-xinerama -no-xrandr -no-tablet -no-openssl -no-xcursor You can have two differently configured versions of Qt alongside without any problems, just remember to call the correct qmake. There is no need to make the Qt bin-folder part of the PATH variable. If you want to omit demos and examples during Qt compilation, omit the -fast option in the configure line and run make sub-src instead of make.

How to Translate

Qt supports I18N and Rockbox Utility uses this. To translate Rockbox Utility do the following:

• add a new file to the TRANSLATIONS line in rbutilqt/rbutilqt.pro.
• run "lupdate"
• edit the resulting *.ts file using "linguist"
• run "lrelease" to convert the *.ts file to the *.qm format that is used for I18N.
• put the resulting *.qm file in the same folder as the executable. Rockbox Utility will then detect the new translation and allow you to use it.
• and don't forget to post the *.ts file to the tracker so we can include it ;-)

Translation status (updated 2008-06-30)

Autodetection

Currently not all devices can be detected automatically. Rockbox Utility will display a warning when autodetection wasn't successful; you can always select your device manually. If you installed Rockbox once it can get detected via the file /.rockbox/rockbox-info.txt. This will work on all devices. See DeviceDetection for further details.

Resolving mountpoints

Brand	Player	Windows	Linux	OS X
Apple	all Ipods	resolving from drive UNC path figured by ipodpatcher (fallback: check for iPod_Control folder)	device node known by ipodpatcher, resolving using mtab	same as linux
Archos	all	detect some specific files (firmware image on disc, magic in firmware file)	same	same
Cowon	X5, M5	unknown (no specific file to check for)	same	same
Iriver	H100, H300	only detection based on USB possible, currently there is no way known to resolve USB PID -> mountpoint	same	same
Iriver	H10	possible recognizing the bootloader file location	same	same
Sandisk	e200, c200	resolving from drive UNC path figured by sansapatcher	device node known by sansapatcher, resolving using mtab	same as linux
Olympus	m:robe 100	possible looking for bootloader file	same	same
Toshiba	Gigabeat	possible searching for bootloader file	same	same

Releasing

• update the version info in version.h and Info.plist
• build against static libraries ;-)
• strip the binaries (seems to be mostly an issue on linux)
• upx the windows binary to cut down its size
• lrelease the language files
• to tag svn. As rbutil now needs parts of the main Rockbox sources we need to tag trunk, not only the rbutil folder. Use a version number as in the following example:
  svn copy svn://svn.rockbox.org/rockbox/trunk svn://svn.rockbox.org/rockbox/tags/rbutil_m1.0.5

History