Just a little advice to anybody playing around with bash on their empeg. Don't type 'g' and press return. Seems there is a little shell script named g that deletes the player binary.

Arghhh, off to go reload the developer image.

-Mike

ROFL!

You're kidding, right?

___________
Tony Fabris

Er, no kidding. The 'g' script is there to aid in development. We generally transfer a new player binary across to mk1 players using Zmodem over serial. Obviously, we compress it first.

The 'g' script, which lives in /empeg/bin, decompresses player.gz and replaces the original player with it.

My copy (v1.01-beta2) appears to verify that there's a player.gz file there first.

Perhaps it's broken, or earlier copies were less paranoid. I'll check it when I get into work later.


Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Does EVERY empeg employee check the BBS right after they wake up in the morning? :-)

Anyway, I'd better get up and get to work!

Rob

Yes, it's because we've got cable modems at work and no ADSL yet at the office. 64kbit and several people all reading the BBS is painful ;)

Hugo

Hey Roger,

Yeah, it said something about player.gz missing. Unfortunately, this was after it deleted player ;-)

Not a big deal to reload the dev image. I just found it kind of ammusing.

-Mike

How come these betas aren't making it to the beta-software page?

Because Empeg now has a small team of alpha testers to bang on their smoke builds for them. Technically, 1.01 Beta 1 and 1.01 Beta 2 were alphas. The name "beta" is misleading. I've been meaning to talk to Mike about that.

Don't worry, this is a good thing. These alpha builds aren't usually good for Joe Consumer usage, and there will still be public betas as always. The only difference is that the internal builds which were previously never released outside the company are now released to a handful of alpha testers as well. This helps the public betas to be more stable.

Understand that one thing Empeg wants to avoid is a bunch of BBS users begging to get on the alpha team. An alpha team is only useful if it's small and manageable, and therefore it's by invitation only.

___________
Tony Fabris

"An alpha team is only useful if it's small and manageable, and therefore it's by invitation only.

And therefore I'm guessing you're on the team?

Brian H. Johnson
MK2 36GB Blue
"Soy un perdedor..."

And therefore I'm guessing you're on the team?

Well, um... Yes. And I think Rob is regretting the invitation by now.

___________
Tony Fabris

"Well, um... Yes."

Well... as long as you keep answering our questions with your trademark speed and accuracy... and champion my next few Wish List entries for the next version of the software.

"Tony" H. Johnson
MK2 36GB Blue
"Soy un perdedor..."

and champion my next few Wish List entries for the next version of the software.

Actually, the Wish List here on the BBS is still the best place to be heard. Us alpha testers are primarily looking for bugs in the smoke builds. When it comes to requesting new features, I still use the BBS Wish List, I don't spam the alpha test mailing list.

___________
Tony Fabris

The alpha team get to put up with some fairly dodgy software (well not VERY dodgy, it's passed our formal testplan, but it's not the most comphrensive testplan of all time). They help us to get rid of the niggly bugs which previously resulted in several successive versions of the same Beta release, which were a waste of everyone's bandwidth.

When a Beta is considered stable, it will then become public. Of course it's still a Beta so some problems or shortcomings may remain, but at least it's likely to work as advertised.

I guess that 1.01 is almost ready for release now. It will be a bug fix release, sorting out some issues from Consumer 1.0 although one or two tiny new features may creep in. The next major Beta will be 1.1, which will become a Consumer release if all goes well.

Rob