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Installing Applications and Sounds

This topic explains how to install applications onto the iPAQ. It also briefly explains how to add sounds to the ipaq-beep service. At this time this process is not automated, and involves some basic editing of configuration files.

ipaq-launcher

The application, ipaq-launcher scans a directory looking for a basic XML file which describes the installed applications. For each demonstration application, a directory is added in /system/apps/data/. Each application places its data files into its own directory. The XML file with the suffix .iqml is parsed and the icon for the application is either loaded from a file or from the binary, itself.
<IQData>
<Application
name="Web Browser"
version="1.0"
author="Unknown"
location="/system/apps/ipaq-web/"
command="ipaq-web"
description="This a sample QNX small-screen browser."
group="Applications"
licon="large_icon.gif"
sicon="small_icon.gif">
</Application>
</IQData>
The majority of this information should be straight foreword. The name is the human readable name which the launcher will display next to the icon. The version number, author and description will be used later to automatically generate an about box. The location is the path to the binary of the program to run. The command is the string to run.
Note: At this time, the command attribute may not have command line arguments. The launcher runs the single command.

Note: At this time, there is no way to signal the launcher that new programs have been installed, slay ipaq-launcher and re-run: 'ipaq-launcher &' via. the serial connection or by telnetting into the device over the network. You can log into the device through telnet using the 'root' account, without a password.

The group is the category of this application. It used to filter other applications out, if many programs are installed. Finally, the icons may be .jpg, .gif or .png files. If these are not provided, the launcher will extract them from the binary, assuming the icons have been defined via. PhAB.

At this time, the easiest way to install these applications is to make the directories and copy the files via QNet. If you have set a hostname on your ipaq such as my_ipaq, it should be available in /net/my_ipaq.

ipaq-beep [-fname,file [,volume] ]

The service, ipaq-beep is a primitive audio service which plays raw audio and sets the volume. At this time is not driven by data from an XML file. It is controlled entirely by command line options which are defined in the iPaq Reference Platform initialization file: /etc/init.

The service takes a list of sound name, sound file pairs with an optional volume setting. Each -f option adds a new sound to the ipaq-beep service. The value for the volume should be a number between 1-100.

Applications request sound to be played by writing a string to /dev/beep. (The service is a QNX Resource Manager, which allows it to take over the /dev/beep namespace.) When an application writes to this path, ipaq-beep responds if it understands the request.

For example, echo -n "click" > /dev/beep will request that a sound named "click" be played.

If you would like to create your own sounds, ipaq-beep uses the .ub format. These sounds have been converted using the open source SoX utility. More information can be found here: http://sox.sourceforge.net/.

Most of the sounds were converted from the .wav format. For example, sox click.wav -r 8000 click.ub
 
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