SlashGear Exclusive - Interview with GeeXboX

SlashGear: do you see GeeXBoX to go into mainstream market with OEM partnership in the future?

Benjamin Zores: We already had receive a lot of offers for GeeXBoX being used in mainstream market And we still are requested for some times. Till now however, we had to decline these offers where manufacturers only seen the potential $$$ and didn’t care about the GPL issues which is something we do We’re still looking for a good partnership however Having a GeeXBoX CD ready to be used shipped in with a mainboard manufacturer for example would be a good start to spread out the distribution :)

SlashGear: As a GeeXBoX developer, how do you find moving from 2.4 to 2.6? do you think the 2.6 is a little too bloated for GeeXBoX?

Benjamin Zores: we were using 2.4, 4 years ago and switch to 2.6 2 years ago. 2.6 kernel is the way to go, that’s the only answer. it was hard to move (but not that hard either) but it’s the only way to support new h/w technologies It provides a lot of improvements and even if the kernel gets bigger and more bloated, it’s a necessary step It also comes with new features like udev that ease a lot with h/w hotplug

SlashGear: Configuring wifi in Linux takes a little work, depending on card’s wireless chip, there are a lot of projects out there like madwifi and etc. How does GeeXBoX overcome those issues to give user ease on wifi config?

Benjamin Zores: GeeXBoX currently only supports basic WiFi features up to WEP encryption but no WPA/WPA2 encryption we include a lot of wifi drivers and they use a generic API for being controlled (wireless_tools) as for the Ethernet configuration, all WiFi related settings can be defined either through generator or at installation (if wanted) WPA will for sure be handled some day, when one contributor (or developer) that has h/w to test it will provide a patch for that its mainly based on contribution and any external one is always welcomed. Next version however will have a native implementation of ndiswrapper which will help wifi support as given the possibility to use win32 drivers under Linux Next version however will have a native implementation of ndiswrapper which will help wifi support as given the possibility to use win32 drivers under Linux

SlashGear: Do you find it difficult to better support a hardware with many manufacturers not open enough to support linux such as giving access to their proprietary drivers and etc?

Benjamin Zores: Yeah it’s pretty hard. Especially for video card support. Right now, we use a generic video display protocol (VESA) to drive the video cards. It has the advantage to work on nearly any kind of card but doesn’t provide h/w video acceleration (overlay). Some cards (all ATI ones, a very few NVidia, Cyberblade and some other) may however use another driver called vidix which provides overlay and video h/w acceleration But we don’t support h/w MPEG decoding (called Xvmc) right now (first reason is due to the fact that we don’t use an X server) and writing such drivers is really difficult without specifications or hardware to test (so at least, manufacturers are welcomed to grant us some test samples)

SlashGear: does GeeXBoX support HD?

Benjamin Zores: GeeXBoX does of course support native HD, but it’s mainly done in software Which will as you can imagine, consume a lot of CPU

SlashGear: How many core developers are on the team aside from volunteers?

Benjamin Zores: GeeXBoX was originally a 2 people team (me and Aurelien Jacobs) for almost 1 1/2 years and a 3 people time for the next year, now we’re 7 people, all involved on their free time

SlashGear: Did GeeXBoX receive any external funding for the project?

Benjamin Zores: not really, we only are granted some donations from time to time by some users but even if it’s always welcomed it’s not something we can count to live from it or pay someone to work on it We’re are however sponsored by some ISPs which provide us webservers, mirrors and bandwidth And thanks to them we’re online

SlashGear: Any other thing you want to say to SlashGear readers?

Benjamin Zores: “have a try at GeeXBoX” :)
GeeXboX is a free download under the GNU licence.

GeeXboX