[PLUG] Rio Karma linux support

[Russell Evans]

I received a Rio Karma for Christmas. Ogg support as well as
Linux support were what I was looking for. The Ethernet port and flac
support are definitely great reasons also. The price we got was 284.44,
free shipping, and $20 mail in rebate, final cost $264.44.

The reason for this post is that after hooking it into my network I was
disappointed to find that it wouldn't pick up a lease. The other hosts
I have on the network work fine so I was worried. 

I have found a few posts on the ogg mailing list where people returned
the karma for this reason, and no posts on how to overcome this. So I
thought I would post what I determined was the issue with my setup.

My dhcp server is ISC dhcp v3.0.1. Looking at the packets with Ethereal,
I saw the karma was looking for the broadcast-address option that I
didn't have set. After setting this, I still had issues. I thought it
might be link negotiation after getting it to talk to a laptop via a
static address and crossover cable.  The issue however is
that allow bootp; must also be set

Once getting it to accept a lease from a range, I wanted to set DHCP to
provide the same lease to the karma so I could connect to it without
having to determine what lease it had. The karma does have a user
interface that will give you information about the current lease, but if
you are in the configuration when you are attempting to connect with the
java application, you get an error and have to restart the application
to try to reconnect. You also need to make sure you configure a password
first or the java app will fail to connect and you'll have to restart it
again.

In playing around with the host settings in dhcp, I found that;

    hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
    fixed-address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
    option broadcast-address xxx.xxx.xx.xxx;
    option routers xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
 
are required and only they can be set. Any other options in the host
setup will cause the karma not to accept a lease.

The java application works well for me. I can see how someone with more
advanced usage might find it limiting but it does what I want.

I use this to make starting the app easy for me

#/bin/sh
#

JAR=$HOME/.rio/rmmlite.jar
java -jar $JAR
exit 0

As rmmlite.jar is carried by the karma and can be downloaded from it via
most web browers, any computer with java installed and an Ethernet port,
should be able to connect to the karma. To me this makes the karma very
portable even it you can't connect to it via a network file system, or
as a usb mass storage device. 

Even if the network's dhcp server doesn't work with the karma, I'm
assuming a lot of commercial SOHO firewalls/routers don't do bootp,  you
can set it up with a static address to get access. Interestingly; the
Ethernet cable supplied with the Karma is a straight-through, not a
crossover cable, so you'll need a switch or hub to plug into. I would
think one system with modem or broadband connections are the norm, and a
crossover cable would make more sense in the package. Or, maybe they
are thinking a one system setup will use the usb connection?

Thank you
Russell