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Barf's dBox page

Legal

It is possible that information or downloads from this page will cause damage to your hardware, software, or anything else (your temper?). It can also not be excluded that usage or downloads, or usage of herein described software, will violate applicable laws, or agreements. By using information or downloads from this page, you agree to take the full responsibility yourself, and not hold the author responsible.

I, as well as the Tuxbox project, do not condone illegally accessing Pay-Tv. Using information or downloads from this page for this, or other illegal purposes, is strictly prohibited.

General

One of my interests is Tuxbox project. It aims for a free, Linux based operating system for the digital TV-Receiver known as the dBox2. See the project's home page. I am active in the Tuxbox forum using the nickname "Barf".

This is a fun project. It is both technologically and socially very interesting. There has never been an official release, and there are also no release-schedule. The project in its current stadium is explicitly aimed at experienced Linux users/programmers. However, there are often unofficial images released. Through these, the project has had a considerable impact, far outside of the programmer community. "Linux on the dBox" has established itself — amazing for a project with no releases! Unfortunately, it has also proved to be a powerful platform for implementing illegal pay-tv decoding, something that is a severe concern for the project. There are also, in particular in the forum, a large number of unexperienced users, who often, sometimes in obnoxious tone, complain over missing support, unfixed bugs, lack of Unix capacities in Windows, etc. (Calling the password file \etc\passwd, routinely killing processes with kill -9, making files executable with chmod 777,...) Official documentation, both user documentation and API documentation, is largely missing. As often the case in situations like this, this breeds the HOWTO-tradition: Documents written by authors who, often, have a very incomplete understanding of the problem, describing (at best) a cookbook method for reaching a particular goal, without any attempts of understanding. (Occasionally, also valuable documents by knowledgeable persons are called "HOWTO"s.)

As a supporter and contributer of free software, nowadays sometimes called open source, for example in the sense of the Free Software Foundation, I am concerned about the relative emphasis on tools for non-free operating systems (in particular for those from a certain Redmond based firm), as well as binary-only releases. The best example of this is the Windows boot manager, a very useful and capable tool, that is almost indispensable in the initial phase.

As I said, an interesting project...

Articles and Tutorials

Barf's Patches

I have written a number of patches, that for one reason or another, are not checked in into CVS. They are presented on the patch page, sometimes together with binaries.

FAQ (for this page)

FAQ

Feedback

Suggestions, criticism, etc are welcome, either directly to me or in the forum.