This is a follow-up to
my previous post about using the aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock (SPAC) on linux. You should probably read that post first.
There is now a new 2.0 version of the "aXbo research" software (
thanks rac for the hint). It is quite similar to version 1.0, with the added feature that you can upload new sounds to the device. It's still a Java application, using a number of Open Source components => Look at NOTICE.txt, and from what I saw it seems it's being developed on
OS X - a shame that they don't provide an easy way to use it with linux: while version 1.0 was launched using
Java Web Start, version 2.0 is installed locally in an OS-specific way which makes it a bit more complicated for the (not Mac / Windows) users. As far as I can tell the software should work fine on
all platforms supported by RXTX (as long as there is a driver for the USB->serial converter of course)...
Here are the steps that allowed me to successfully run version 2.0 on linux:
- download aXbo_windows_2_0_11.exe
- run
wine aXbo_windows_2_0_11.exe, this will install version 2.0.11 (don't install the drivers, only the application)
- at the end of the install process, you can directly start the program. for me this triggered the download of aXbo_windows_2_0_13.exe (why they don't offer this file for download directly is a mystery)
- install / update to version 2.0.13 using wine again (and again, don't install the drivers, only the application)
At this point you can already use aXbo research through wine. I didn't test the sound upload, but the rest seemed to work fine, although there were some glitches with the display. Here is how to run it without wine:
- create a directory to hold the files, eg
mkdir ~/aXbo-2.0
- copy the .jar files to that directory, eg
cp -rp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/aXbo2/lib ~/aXbo-2.0/
- move axbo.jar one directory up, eg
mv ~/aXbo-2.0/lib/axbo.jar ~/aXbo-2.0/
- get
librxtxSerial.so, eg
cd ~/aXbo-2.0/lib/ ; wget http://blog.crox.net/uploads/librxtxSerial.so
- run the application like this:
cd ~/aXbo-2.0/ ; java -Djava.library.path=lib/ -jar axbo.jar
NOTE / RXTX:
- the librxtxSerial.so offered for download here is 32-bit, which means you need to run a 32-bit JRE.
- instead, you can also install a distribution-provided librxtxSerial.so, eg with Gentoo 64-bit:
emerge rxtx
java -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib64/rxtx-2/ -jar axbo.jar
(in this example you obviously have to select a 64-bit JRE)
(RXTX is distributed under a variant of the LGPL license, you'll find more info on the
RXTX website.)
NOTE / Sounds Upload:
Be aware that the sounds upload function will upload the whole package at once, and that it will replace the sounds currently on the device, and not just add new ones.
