Cross Compiling for UK Tivo

[jonwilson030981]

I have a Thompson Scenium (UK Tivo sw 2.5.5), and have been trying to compile some utils for the tivo, including tar and ls. However, when running they display "Illegal Instruction" instead of working properly, although odly the --help params work?!?. I used the cross compiler from tivoutils...
usr.local.powerpc-tivo.tar.bz2 with --host=x86_64 and --build=ppc for the ./configures, but the created binaries don't seem to work. I did check during the make and they do seem to be building using the gcc which shipped with the cross compiler. (They fail as expected on the host system).

For tar I used...
./configure --host=powerpc --build=x86_64 CC=/usr/local/tivo/bin/gcc CFLAGS="-msoft-float -mstrict-align"
make

Then copied the binary from tar-1.14/src/tar to the tivo to run.

(The TIVO-FAQ said tivo didn't have an FPU and that DWORDs had to be DWORD aligned)

Many Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
If you need more info then please let me know.

Jon Wilson

P.S I am building on Fedora Core 2 x86_64 on an AMD64, and I did remember to FTP them in binary mode (in the end!!!).

[sanderton]

Presume you are doing this to learn about the cross compiler, as binaries are easily available?

[jonwilson030981]

If you could post me a link to the binaries for tar/ls etc then that would be useful. However, I would like to be able to cross compile Python for the Tivo as well possibly as C code so that I can begin development. What is most annoying is that I am so close to getting it working! Perhaps it is my cross compiler? If you have a cross compiler which you know to work then I would very much appreciate it. Do you know of differences between cross compiling for Tivo Series 1 & 2? Maybe that is the cause of my troubles?

Many Thanks.

Hopy you can help.

Jon

[sanderton]

Never touched the compiler I'm afraid; you can find most of the S1 binaries at www.stevejenkins.com or in posts or links from the wiki in my sig.

Why Python? You know TiVo has a built in TCL interpreter which has ready made extensions to talk to the TiVo database, yes? All existing TiVo hack work is either in TCL for things which manipulate the way that TiVo works or in C for things which are independednt of the TiVo functionality.

[jonwilson030981]

I was hoping to be able to export the Tivo functionality as a webservice, to allow remote access from different clients. Python, it seems can do this very very little in the way of code. Plus I would like to learn Python! Does the TiVo use TCL for its database? Or is it just that a TCL wrapper has been written for it?

I couldn't find any downloads on the site you listed, but I got my cross compiler from the tivoutils project, but it doesn't seem to work!

Jon Wilson

[sanderton]

tivoapp, the core software, has been implemented by TiVo as a TCL interpreter, so it can run scripts which directly access the db.

Doesn't TiVoWeb offer the kind of "web service" app you're after?

[jonwilson030981]

No. At least not as far as I know. I meant proper webservices, rather than a web-interface. Using SOAP/XML-RPC, that way you can write a client in pretty much any language/platform. It does seem possible though to get Tcl to talk webservices. However, I am so close to getting python running.

It displays its help ok, but when trying to run the command line, it just hangs. (It even stops picture playback on LiveTv).

Jon