Supporting the Olive One player

[Kidahl]

Hi,
I recently purchased a great embedded player/amp from Olive as part of a Kickstarter (see http://www.myoliveone.com)

Unfortunately for us backers, the company now seem to have gone offline, leaving the backers with a player that only supports half of the promised features. Fortunately for us, we have the root password for the unit.

I have been able to play sound from the command line using: cat /dev/urandom | aplay -f S16_LE -c 2, and it seems to have configured ALSA.

The unit has no AUX in, so we are currenly limited to very bad Bluetooth streaming from mobile phones and an unstable GUI.
The hardware is however fantastic and the backers would love to keep the unit alive into the future.

Developing the GUI on the unit is probably too much for a small non-tech community so the possibility of running a community-developed headless server on the unit seems to be a great idea.

I am myself a professional developer, but not for linux. Most other backers are hi-fi enthusiasts. I suppose we are 100-1000 stranded users, maybe more.

The unit is running BusyBox on: Linux OLIVE 3.0.35 #1 SMP Tue Apr 26 14:52:01 CST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Could you please give me some pointers on the dependencies of the distribution so that I can get a grip of the scope of porting Rune?

There is no apt-get, but RPM seems to be available on the unit. It would really be appreciated if it was possible to avoid cross-compiling binaries.

Currently I am considering finding a way to install the Raspberry PI distribution, but I suspect there will be a lot of missing pieces (such as phyton).

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Karl Ivar Dahl

[hondagx35]

[Kidahl]

[Kidahl]

[Kidahl]

[Kidahl]

[Kidahl]

The unit has an optional disk (1TB on mine), the music directory is shared via SMB and mounted under /cfg/data. So if we could install Rune in this folder it would be much easier for non-tech backers to update it in the future.

BTW, I believe some of these units are for sale quite cheaply these days, If you have a "good feeling" about me successfully porting Rune you can make a great bargain for an amazing amp.

[Kidahl]

[hondagx35]

[Kidahl]

Well, I suppose "cheap" is a relative word. The amp is a real great piece of hardware that is unfortunately hampered by unfinished software. We would not put in this effort if the unit was not still a significant investment. The last release implements about half of what backers were promised, and two years late at that..

The last firmware is also the last we heard from Olive. Up until then there has been continuous dialogue on https://olivemediainc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us . Some backers have units for sale there.

Given that we have root access to the unit, is serial access needed at this point? There is a mini-jack at the back that I believe is a serial connection, but I have no serial port on my machine.

I´ll upload an image of the hardware an have a look at ArchLinux. Thanks.