rolo?

[michael.conner]

I saw that Rolo is working as of a few days ago in CVS for iPods.  How do you get an apple.ipod firmware file to rolo into?  Do you just copy the firmware that was saved using ipodpatcher during install to the root dir and rename it to apple.ipod?

(Tried asking on IRC last night, everyone seemed to be away...)

[dan_a]

I think Linuxstb is the only person who's really tried it so far.

Why not try doing the copy that you've suggested and see if it works?

[SilleeString]

May I humbly ask what rolo is?  Sorry for my ignorance 

[senab]

May I humbly ask what rolo is?  Sorry for my ignorance 

Rolo is the Rockbox Loader and basically lets you startup other firmwares (such as the Apple iPod one) from within Rockbox... I think anyway.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RoLo

[Drkepilogue]

I tryed ROLO with the ipod, and it doesnt work well.  It would try and load another frimware, but it gets stuck when it said, excecuting.

[Llorean]

It's designed to be used to load other builds of Rockbox for testing and debugging purposes.

[michael.conner]

Ah... so it's not designed to boot the Apple firmware from Rockbox, but just to boot into other builds of Rockbox? 

[Llorean]

Ideally it should be able to boot the Apple firmware, but I don't believe that functions yet. I've booted the Apple firmware from a file at an earlier point during Rockbox development (during some bootloader tests) and the Apple firmware doesn't seem to run properly from a file anyway. I don't know if the cause of the problems we had has ever been traced.

One thing you might be able to  do (though I haven't tested) is possibly rename the linux bin file to linux.ipod and Rolo into that (assuming you have the ext2 partition already set up.) It may or may not work, but I'd be interested to find out.

[linuxstb]

Rolo on the ipods is still broken - as some of you have found out.  But the basic idea is that you browse to a firmware file on your hard drive, play it like a music file, and rolo will load and run that firmware without rebooting.

The first step will be to make it load a different version of Rockbox to the currently running one (which is of limited use - they'll both share the same .rockbox folder) or to load an IPL (Linux) kernel.  It would be nice if it could be used to start the Apple firmware, and I plan on trying to get that working, but it's not a high priority for me - the Apple firmware is much more fussy about the state of the hardware than Rockbox or IPL, and will be harder to get working.

However, you can't just rename files to ".ipod" and expect rolo to run them - "rockbox.ipod" has a small header at the start identifying the target player that firmware is for and it also contains a checksum.  When loading either the IPL kernel or the Apple firmware works, I'll add support for .bin files to Rolo directly.

[Llorean]

Ah, there we go. Straight from the man who knows what he's talking about.

[michael.conner]

Cool -- thanks for the infos!