My dad decided to treat him self, so he's putting together a audio server to sit next to the Hi-Fi and feed it the CD colection without any of this changing the disk rubbish.
Basically its a fan-less Mini-ITX board and a big IDE disk in a rather nice case (mini-itx.com sell them in the UK) its also got the dinkiest internal PSU I've ever seen! (if you ignore the power block you hide outside the case of course...)
So.. what we did...
- Put the thing together
- Install Debian... what else? ;)
- Marvel at how quiet the thing is
- Figure out how to drive the display and buttons...
- Grab the picoLCD SDK (includes a C library and example app)
- Play with it a bit
- Decide doing everything in C is a bit too much like hard work
- Figure out how to write a Python module
- Write a Python module (which you can find at http://projects.sucs.org/svn/LiFiPod/pyusblcd/)
- Write a really simple test program to make sure everything works.
- Figure out how to make it play music...
- Look at a few options
- Succumb to MPD propaganda from various people
- Bodge together a simple interface to play music.
- Play with it
- Make a Video - not too bad for a days work!
... - Make it do all the home server stuff the old, noisy, bogged together Pentium Pro box was doing
I've now left the implementation of a rather more elegant solution, with browsing for media and stuff to my Dad... or me when I'm next home ;)
Future Developments?...
- Actually plug it into the Hi-Fi! ;)
- Media browsing... It really needs some kinda of way to select an artist or album to play for example.
- Remote Control... its got a IR receiver, but the C library doesn't yet decode what is received, so its all a bit of a garbled mess.
About October last year I bought my self a DVB card so I could watch the odd thing on TV. I spent some time researching the Linux compatibility of such things and settled on a Hauppauge NOVA-T PCI card, which several people had reported as supported. Frustratingly in there wisdom Hauppauge changed the chipset this card used shortly before I bought mine without telling anyone.
So I waited and shore enough a Linux driver was written for the new chipset, sadly the only kernel this was included in didn't boot on my system due to ACPI bugs. The ACPI bugs were soon fixed, but some bright spark had decided to rewrite large chunks of the DVB subsystem. Finally in 2.6.12 the card was back to being supported, so I with the lack of official Debian package of it, I tried to build my own, migrating my working 2.6.11 config. This didn't boot as the drivers for my SATA controller went loaded early enough.
*sigh*
So I waited for official packages of 2.6.12. This is slowed slightly by me completely missing that the 2.6.12 the packages go from being called kernel-image-blah to linux-image-blah (thanks to chckens for pointing this out), which for Debian as a multi kernel distribution makes a lot of sense. Hmm no support for this card from the Debian kernel image. I guess thats because the driver relays on a firmware blob of some sort, and such things are now not meant to be included in Debian. Which is great from a moral high ground sort of perspective but a royal pain in the ass if you happen to have hardware that relies on such things. Luckily those nice Ubuntu folks are not quite so insane about such things so I grabbed there 2.6.12 kernel, and Woo-Hoo! it works, with a few quick updates to ALSA packages I even have working sound to go with it.
After 9 months I now have it working properly in Linux, and no longer have to suffer theire truly awful windows software! Now I just need someone to write a Linux driver for my HP ScanJet 3670 and I will never have to brave Windows apart from to play the brilliant game that is Lego Star Wars
Note to hardware manufacturers, if you insist on changing the chip set in your hardware, please change the model number as well!
