Most Gumstix devices I’ve encounter (Basix and Verdex Pro) come with a built-in Web server known as Boa. If you’ve ever watch the Gumstix boot from a console, you’ll see an error about gethostbyname. Once the Gumstix is up and running, you’ll find no Web server active. And any attempt to issue an /etc/init.d/boa start only results in the same gethostbyname error.

Here’s a simple fix.

Go to the boa.conf file located in /etc/boa/ directory and find the line with ServerName. Simply change what’s there to a name of your choosing, like this example:

# ServerName: the name of this server that should be sent back to
# clients if different than that returned by gethostname + gethostbyname

ServerName www.mygumstix.net

Once the change is made, start the server with: /etc/init.d/boa start

If all goes well, navigate with your browser to the IP address of your Gumstix and you should see the default Gumstix web page!

I needed to implement a reliable network connection into my Verdex Pro once it was attached to the GPSstix since the USB networking is hosed. Here was my solution to this wireless networking issue.

Step 1. Enable only necessary options
As you’ll see from my config from /etc/default/bluetooth, I disable most Bluetooth options. The key parts are at the end dealing with PAND (Personal Area Network daemon).

# Bluetooth configuraton file

# Attach to the onboard bluetooth adapter  (allowed values are "true" and "false")
HCIATTACH_ENABLE=true

# Start of hcid (allowed values are "true" and "false")
HCID_ENABLE=false

# Config file for hcid
HCID_CONFIG="/etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf"

# Start sdpd (allowed values are "true" and "false")
SDPD_ENABLE=false

# Start hidd (allowed values are "true" and "false")
HIDD_ENABLE=false

# Arguments to hidd
#HIDD_OPTIONS=""

# Run hid2hci (allowed values are "true" and "false")
HID2HCI_ENABLE=false

# Bind rfcomm devices (allowed values are "true" and "false")
RFCOMM_ENABLE=false

# Config file for rfcomm
RFCOMM_CONFIG="/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf"

# Start dund (allowed values are "true" and "false")
DUND_ENABLE=false

# Arguments to dund
DUND_OPTIONS="--listen --persist"

# Start pand (allowed values are "true" and "false")
PAND_ENABLE=true

# Arguments to pand
PAND_OPTIONS="--role GN --listen"

Step 2 Add the bnep0 interface
Assign your Gumstix a static IP address so you can connect. Here’s a snippet of my /etc/network/interfaces file.

iface bnep0 inet static
      address 10.10.10.1
      netmask 255.255.255.252
      network 10.10.10.0
      broadcast 10.10.10.3

The netmask above defines a two-host network. Your outside connection (laptop, desktop, mobile device) must use 10.10.10.2 as its IP address as well as the netmask above. Sure, I could have installed a small DHCP server to issue IPs automatically, but since the same device will connect to the Gumstix, I didn’t see the need.

Anyone wishing to use sox for audio file conversions on the Gumstix may be interested in this information.

While you could simply cross-compile sox using the OE environment for Gumstix, you’ll quickly learn that a number of additional dependencies are required. Here they are in the order they need to be installed (all in the OE environment):

• libogg0 >=1.1
• libvorbis >= 1.0.1
• libmad0 >= 0.15.16

I used sox-13.0.0 for my app. A few flags have changed between the various versions, but here is what I used to convert a directory full of .raw audio files to .wav files:

for i in /media/card/*.raw
do
    sox -2 -s -r 8000 -c2 $i ${i%.*}.wav
done

The flags indicate the following:

-2 sample size in bytes
-s signed-integer
-r 8000 is the sample rate
-c2 is the number of channels

Good luck! Hope it helps.