HOWTO: Install basic G15Tools support for the Logitech G15

[drdnl]

My turn to ask a question , does anyone else here have 100% cpu usage when running g15composer listening to a pipe? (g15composer ~/g15lcd for example). I'd like to start trying out programming for amarok but I dont want to run software that uses up that amount of resources. I'm guessing maybe the polling interval is set too high? Any solutions would be greatly appreciated.

[Thunderstriker]

yeah my cpu goes up to 90% to

[bstock]

I have a dual-core, and 1 of my cores spikes to full CPU usage. I would guess the program is running some kind of loop to output to the LCD, but I haven't looked at the code or anything. It would be cool to see some better outputs for this, as it could be very useful when used in the proper applications.

[Aneurysm9]

Hello,

I'm one of the g15tools developers, so hopefully I can answer some questions. I have working packages built for Dapper and the package structure is in the svn repository so future versions will have the debian directory in the tarball. Unfortunately, I don't have hosting space for them and I don't want to clutter up the sourceforge files page with packages for every distro. If anyone has hosting space and would be willing to set up a repository for them, or add them to an existing repo, that would be greatly appreciated. They're attached, though without the source .gz files as that would put the attachment over the forum's limit. If someone wants to put them in a repo, let me know and I'll send the sources as well.

I've also attached an Amarok script that I've been working on that uses g15composer. It's not the greatest, but it displays artist and track info as well as a progress bar and time info. You may need to edit it and change the location of $PIPE if you use something other than /var/run/lcdpipe.

As for processor usage, I'm not seeing that here, but I'm running Gentoo on this machine. I'll bring the G15 down to one of the Dapper boxes tonight or tomorrow and see if I can reproduce the problem.

WRT recording and playing back G-key macros, it's not yet possible but should be fairly simple to implement as a G15daemon client if anyone is so inclined.

Edit:

With the Amarok script, you may also need to change the font that is loaded if it's in a different location or not available, or if you just want a different font. You'll also need DCOP::Amarok:layer installed.

I have found that starting Amarok with the script running but no media playing causes g15composer to start chewing processor cycles. My guess would be that it's because some of the fields aren't populated and g15composer is choking on one of the commands that doesn't have all the arguments it should. I'll look into that some more.

Edit 2:
Ok, the problem was lack of data in some fields. I've worked around it in the script, but I'll look into making sure that g15composer checks for complete data as well as this could be what's causing problems for some of you. The new script is attached and should work.

Edit 3:

We've tracked down the problem with g15composer using all available cycles. Please ensure that you're telling g15composer to read from a pipe and not a regular file. You can make a new pipe with "mknod lcdpipe p". That will give you a pipe called "lcdpipe" in the current directory. Then run "g15composer lcdpipe" and you can then give it commands such as "echo 'TL "this is a test"' > lcdpipe" and it will output to the LCD.

[Aneurysm9]

i managed to install it but it should support libgraphlcd does anyone know how to get this working?

You will need to apply the patch to graphlcd 1.3 from the g15daemon tarball and rebuild graphlcd or use graphlcd-svn where the patch is already applied.

[drdnl]

Aneurysm9, thank you very much for all the work so far. I'll be trying out the packages and the script when i get back later today. Hopefully the cpu bug will be squashed soon,

Regards,
D

[drdnl]

Congratulations Aneurysm9, you have the distinction of creating the hardest script I've ever had to install Nonetheless I'm still grateful, even with my very limited coding abilities I can see that it should be quite a nice script once up and running.

At the moment my problem is not being able to install DCOP::Amarok:layer properly, I had to fix some earlier dependancy problems but this last one eludes me:

make test
PERL_DL_NONLAZY=1 /usr/bin/perl "-MExtUtils::Command::MM" "-e" "test_harness(0, 'blib/lib', 'blib/arch')" t/*.t
t/1....ok 2/89ERROR: Multiple available KDE sessions!
Please specify the correct session to use with --session or use the
--all-sessions option to broadcast to all sessions.
t/1....NOK 4
#     Failed test (t/1.t at line 14)
#          got: ''
#     expected: '0'
# *** Amarok needs to be open.
ERROR: Multiple available KDE sessions!
Please specify the correct session to use with --session or use the
--all-sessions option to broadcast to all sessions.
t/1....NOK 5
#     Failed test (t/1.t at line 16)
#          got: ''
#     expected: '0'
# *** Amarok needs to be open.
# Looks like you planned 89 tests but only ran 85.
t/1....dubious
        Test returned status 6 (wstat 1536, 0x600)
DIED. FAILED tests 4-5, 86-89
        Failed 6/89 tests, 93.26% okay
Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of Failed
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t/1.t          6  1536    89   10  11.24%  4-5 86-89
 (55 subtests UNEXPECTEDLY SUCCEEDED).
Failed 1/1 test scripts, 0.00% okay. 6/89 subtests failed, 93.26% okay.
make: *** [test_dynamic] Error 6
daniel@ubuntu:~/DCOP-Amarok-Player-0.036$

I'm running XGL/Compix on ubuntu dapper 6.06 (Gnome), I tried make test --all-sessions but that didn't work. With some hackish fumbling i managed to install dcop player but of course if it didnt pass the tests its not going to work, this is the output from your script:

ERROR: Multiple available KDE sessions!
Please specify the correct session to use with --session or use the
--all-sessions option to broadcast to all sessions.

On a sidenote, is DCOP::Amarok:layer necessary? this old script for g15lcd manages without (but is of course much simpler).

-D

Edit: In the hope that maybe I just made a stupid mistake I installed the script directly into Amarok after I realized that that might be what I had to do. Unfortunately it complains about the same "which session?" stuff.

[Nappateemu]

How to install XMMS plug-in for Ubuntu and G15Daemon?
I found the sources from sourceforge, but after installing g15tools from .deb files they don't seem to work...

[Aneurysm9]

How to install XMMS plug-in for Ubuntu and G15Daemon?
I found the sources from sourceforge, but after installing g15tools from .deb files they don't seem to work...

The XMMS plugin isn't handled by the Makefile from g15daemon, you need to first install g15daemon (including libg15daemon-client-dev if you're using the debs) and then build the XMMS plugin from the source.

[Aneurysm9]

drdnl,

If you want, you can remove the dependency on DCOP::Amarok:layer, but I would expect that it then would be more resource intensive as you would need to use the cli dcop client, starting a new session for each bit of data you want and perhaps parsing some of the results. Usage dropped for me from 7% down to about 3% after switcing to DCOP::Amarok:layer rather than the cli dcop client.

If you want to do it, that script that you linked should provide guidance, just replace the $amarok->(etc) lines with calls to the cli dcop client.