Hi,
This is my first post here, but I have read this very long thread with much interest in the past few month.
I own an Opus 4 for 2 years now, and have been globally pleased by my machine. Unfortunately I encountered some issues that reduce greatly my listening experience.
The main issue is the support for gapless playback. I have quite a lot of gapless albums, which when played on the Opus, are no more gapless. I can hear a small pause when the Opus switch from one track to the other.
I contacted the Olive Technical Support and after some back and forth, they told me that this must be a HW problem. I highly doubt this, since I can play some very long audio tracks without any issue, and I can listen to my gapless albums through UPnP without any gap as well. So this looks more like a not long enough buffer in their software to handle the track change without any loss or something approching.
As a software developer on embedded Linux devices, I thought I might as well take a look at the machine internals by myself. So the first thing would be to enable a remote access to the machine (ssh).
And this is what I did
Procedure to enable ssh access to the Opus 4 (I didn't try on other systems, since I only own an Opus 4, but it should be similar).
Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for any damage, blah blah blah. =>
Do this at your own riskTools required
- Tri-wing screwdriver (Something like
this)
- Phillips screwdriver
- External 3.5" SATA Hard-Drive enclosure (or capacity to plug the Opus Hard Drive in your computer)
- Preferably a Linux distribution (I personally use
Linux Mint), but it should work as well from Windows with some additional software installed (I might do another post with specifics for Windows).
Procedure
- Do a backup of your music (I don't want you to loose all your ripping work in case of a bad failure
)
- Unscrew the two screws at the back of the Opus 4 using the tri-wing screwdriver.
- Remove the cover. Take care to not alter any cable between the front panel and the main board.
- Unplug the two cables on the Hard drive.
- Unscrew the four Hard drive screws using the phillips screwdriver.
- Remove the hard drive and put it in your external enclosure (or in your computer if you have room for it).
- Boot your preferred Linux distribution and mount the second partition of your Opus Hard Drive (/dev/sdb2 in my case, but the device name might be different on your system):
Code:
mkdir opus
mount /dev/sdb2 opus
cd opus
- Open the file etc/init.d/rcS with your preferred editor (I use vi)
- Search for the text ssh. On my system the interesting lines are 408, 409 and 410. Remove the comment in front of them (remove the # in front of each line). The new lines should look like this:
Code:
# close ssh
chmod 777 /work/sshdall udevstart udevd
cd /work
./sshd
- Save the file and exit the editor.
- Open the file work/install-ssh/etc/sshd_config
Code:
vi work/install-ssh/etc/sshd_config
- Search for "AuthorizedKeysFile". On my system it is on line 45. Remove the comment in front of the line.
- Add the full path to the authorized key file in the root folder as follows:
Code:
AuthorizedKeysFile /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
- Save the file and exit the editor.
- Now we need to create a private/public key pair and add the public key in the authorized_keys file.
- Create the directory .ssh
- On your local home folder create a RSA private/public key pair if you don't already have one (google if you want more details on this)
Code:
pushd $HOME
mkdir .ssh
cd .ssh
ssh-keygen
popd
- The contents of your public key file (id_rsa.pub) should look like this:
Code:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCx0iy6DJCaWbe1A+m4uH598A/cti8WDw82O8+j2ifj5jR7fvvUHQ91uJBDuFLef8FtScq5N5fy3HBg267EyyzN29hteReql2ypOlw4eGnTofdXNdRjMIIRZeb1zxaGxYP4ZKj0tRX5LGcujHLIEgs5rp1U5e9GX84EDctpPbp7aS8i/SNlOCBekmM06ZiEIIJg7ssUS+wp2Toq8okr9YOj2VtOoMbaR6m1DaC3I42y9ZwIx0NVDEnrfpc6Oa7vPcvmmp/AVl+ujgZELaVSMdyybgXXOBLHB7PG04biAnIHMebGH7InZukp2+Raa8GunZx5lSk6CsLcH3tIYsKY55ud franck@mymachine
- Append this public key to the Opus authorized key file.
Code:
cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> root/.ssh/authorized_keys
- Unmount the partition
- Repeat the steps on the third partition (/dev/sdb3 in my case), since we don't know which partition is booted by the Opus.
- Now put back the hard drive in the Opus, screw everything back, and boot your Opus.
If everything works, you should now be able to ssh to your opus (replace the ip address by the ip address of your own Opus server):
Code:
ssh root@192.168.0.103
Et voilà
Limitations: As soon as the Opus goes to sleep, the ssh server stops working. I will look into it and check if we can re-activate once the system goes out of sleep mode.
rc
Androids now look more attractive for me when I'm in the market for a tablet.
