Gen4 GPL Source code: it's there!

thinkfat · Post by **thinkfat** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:13 pm

check here

drwoonzer · Post by **drwoonzer** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:26 pm

YEEEEES!!!!!!!!

That's what i was waiting for!
maybe soonthe first free programs will come out...

fusen · Post by **fusen** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:21 pm

let's see what this actually opens up

Reppu · Post by **Reppu** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:25 pm

I hope the programmers on this forum can provide us with a Firmware much more capable than the original. Doesn't seem that complex to achieve.

zachman123 · Post by **zachman123** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:42 pm

I got an email today from the webmaster (really the only archos person I talked to that was hopeful and nice about the source code) that it was up.
THIS IS GREAT!

dm8tbr · Post by **dm8tbr** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:46 pm

fusen wrote:let's see what this actually opens up

yeah, same thoughts here. I'll have a look this weekend.

kawiultraman · Post by **kawiultraman** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 5:51 pm

I just downloaded it and extracted the source files. It looks very complete, including makefiles, documentation, etc.

Edit: Just to clarify the above statement... it seems to be a complete distribution of the Linux OS source used on the series 4 units.

devildriver · Post by **devildriver** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 7:35 pm

OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY!!!!!

martinjay · Post by **martinjay** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 7:56 pm

Edit: Just to clarify the above statement... it seems to be a complete distribution of the Linux OS source used on the series 4 units.

If it really is the whole OS source, does that necessarily mean one could add apps of their own, repackage it and run a "new" OS? I mean after all those things Archos did, is it really that simple? Maybe the Flash-chip only accepts some sort of encrypted key before it allows the installation of the firmware...

boojay · Post by **boojay** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:13 pm

martinjay wrote:
Edit: Just to clarify the above statement... it seems to be a complete distribution of the Linux OS source used on the series 4 units.
If it really is the whole OS source, does that necessarily mean one could add apps of their own, repackage it and run a "new" OS? I mean after all those things Archos did, is it really that simple? Maybe the Flash-chip only accepts some sort of encrypted key before it allows the installation of the firmware...

you need a healthy dose of optimism.

if there's a will, there's a cow........wait a sec.

kitty · Post by **kitty** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:18 pm

If you're a WIndows person, you can use this freeware to unpack a bz2 file the .iso file contains http://www.iceows.com/Download.htm

You can then use Windows to unzip the zip file.

I could post all 20,166 files on 604wifi.com (I think) if there is great interest....

Kurtis · Post by **Kurtis** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:19 pm

Downloaded. The toolchain is building now.

I've gotta say: this is a nice source release. The TiVo source releases aren't nearly this well organized.

I'll start poking around looking while stuff builds.

Pingmeister · Post by **Pingmeister** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:35 pm

I just submitted this as a news item to Engadget and Gizmodo. My hope is that some tinkerers will be driven to the device now that the source code is available.

RK · Post by RK » Wed Feb 14, 2007 10:24 pm

Great news!
I actually like the current firmware, it's just that stupid hard drive lock that doesn't allow me to swap 504 drives thats annoying. Maybe, that can be fixed thanks to this.

Kurtis · Post by **Kurtis** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:21 pm

Well, good news and bad news.

Good news first. This is a good release. Run "make menuconfig" to create some support stuff, then copy in the config from the cofigs directory that matches the archos x04 you want to build for (the 504 in my case) and run make. About twenty minutes (I think) or so later, on my Athlon XP running gentoo, I had two files and a bunch of directories.

The two files? rootfs.arm_nofpu.cramfs and optfs.arm_nofpu.cramfs. There are, more or less, the exact same files we had from ripping the hidden section at the end of the drive. Some things are missing (like /usr/bin/avos) but these things are not GPL; they're internally developed at Archos without relying on linking statically to GPL parts.

Bad news next. The files are signature-less. The rootfs.arm_nofpu.cramfs file doesn't have the leading 256 bytes at all, and the optfs.arm_nofpu.cramfs has them, but they're all zeros. Now, there's a addrootfs.sh script in the arch/compressed directory of the kernel, but it has a different name (root_fs_arm_nofpu.cramfs) so I'm wondering if it is an example from montavista linux or something, or a previous iteration of development, but that script isn't in the kernel distribution from my gentoo box, so I don't think it's in the normal tree. Of course, I could be totally wrong about all this.

My guess is that this development environment is run through a couple more non-GPL tools that do the signing and bundle into the .aos files we download as firmware.

So, it's useful, but unless we can figure out what those signatures are, and how they're used, I don't think this gets us on the box.

gszczesz · Post by **gszczesz** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:27 am

Damn, I was hoping the avos code would be available which would allow us to quickly exploit any bugs/weaknesses..... So basically they released what we already grabbed from the extracted directories, but in c++ form...

Ahh well... it did sound too good to be true... back to looking for an exploit...

Greg

p.s. which compiler did you use to compile it with fro the DaVinci chip?

Kurtis · Post by **Kurtis** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:15 am

They just build using the standard gcc toolchain with uClibc.

The DaVinci is just a multicore chip on the inside: one core of ARM and one core of DSP (I think...)

Anyway, it's ARM code it compiles. There's no FPU because they farm all that out to the DSP.

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:29 am

kitty wrote:I could post all 20,166 files on 604wifi.com (I think) if there is great interest....

I think you should! That way people have more access to it, and more places for people to stumble upon it.

bazz · Post by **bazz** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:33 am

kitty wrote:If you're a WIndows person, you can use this freeware to unpack a bz2 file the .iso file contains http://www.iceows.com/Download.htm

Couldn't you just use 7zip?

Tramp · Post by **Tramp** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 3:10 am

Aww, and I thought this would be amazing :(

Still good of them though.