Saturday, December 24, 2016

RadioShark v1 on Ubuntu 16.04.1

Friend gave me a RadioShark v1 and a challenge (get it working on a current Linux distro). Woke up a bit early this morning and started pounding on it. Per usual practice, I started with other people's code (this is where I am now). It works because the tarball maintainer (http://www.productivity.org/projects/shark/) included a statically linked binary.

The tuning and LED functions work but (also as usual) there's bugs: no matter what command (other than "-h"), the binary stalls for 60+ seconds before it executes and returns. This doesn't affect the audio though.

Reversing this is going to be a challenge because Ubuntu no longer supports libhid, which was primarily a 32-bit library. I'm hoping that I can either port the code to use the libhid-api library or bypass the library calls altogether. If you know me, you'd realize that my preference is for the latter.

For now, I'm enjoying listening to local stations while catching up on a backlog for the document manager. Will take a first crack at tracing/debugging later today. I'm also wondering if plugging a USB1 device into a USB3 bus might have something to do with it.

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