November 30, 2005

Whosa Whatsa Car PC?

Every once in a while Car PC stories pop up and then they just die. This cycles stories are about a Buick [ehomeupgrade.com] and a Ford [mp3car.com]. Yes, they look professionally installed and the shots of the screens show some great eye-candy but, how much do they cost? I'm guessing the Ford was well over $1k while the Buick was probably more around $600-$700.

For most people this is quite cost prohibitive considering the capabilities you get in return. For most end-users it boild down to a DVD/CD player, possibly digital media file player and possibly GPS display. Because of the flexible nature of these systems they are capable of so much more than anyone is probably using them for. maybe in the future we'll see systems similar to these living up to their full potential, until then we have to settle for the geek status.

Posted by Guy at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2005

Fubooee

This [fbui.org] is something I'll definitely have to check out when I get my Mini-ITX system back up. It looks like just the thing for embedded UI's that don't want to drop into user mode, but prefer to have a single binary ala "monolithic kernel mode".

It supports most i/o operations and graphic primitives. It also claims to support a limited MPEG playback capability. I'll have to test this. Maybe VideoLAN client (VLC) would be a good port for this. Hmmm... Another interesting project for when I have more time.

Posted by Guy at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 22, 2005

EPIA System Init

I think I've decided that when the Mini-ITX was together the boot time was way too long. The actual kernel boot was very quick, but when Gentoo [gentoo.org] probed for devices and loaded daemons it did it serially. Normally serial loads aren't bad, but these types of loads are I/O intensive. So, there's lots of CPU-spinning time where nothing useful is being accomplished.

To alleviate this problem I found this new init system, Initng [dyndns.org]. From the website:

Initng is a full replacement of the old and in many ways depricated sysvinit tool. It is designed with speed in mind, doing as much as possible asynchronously.In other words: It will boot your unix-system much faster, and give you more control and statistics over your system.

Sounds too good to be true. However, the author did run some comparisons that (on the surface) look reputable.

Notice that total boottime when from 41secs to only 17secs, loading same services! Also watch the nice hardrive troughput and utilization, not mutch io-wait here.

When the system is back to its original goodness, I'll try and report back.

Posted by Guy at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

Gentoo News

Sweet! Gentoo smart people have released/made public an Unofficial Gentoo Development Guide [firedrop.org.uk]. This bad boy sports such topics as how to write ebuilds and how to effectively use the GNU toolchain for building. Obviously it's a work-in-progress aka living document and therefore has a lot of room for improvement, but the initial release looks *very* informative. This might just lead to a plethora of specialized ebuilds that could easily be thrown around in portage overlays. Say...specific ebuilds for Mini-ITX boards providing specific flags, patches, etc. I mean a portage overlay could be created for each EPIA board providing something like a Board Support Package (BSP) for Gentoo-based systems. Hmm....

Posted by Guy at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Cool (?) Book

So I found this book Geek My Ride [amazon.com] when browsing through my local readings and it looks quite interesting. Of course, Amazon says it was published on the 25th of April, but it's not yet released. I thought that was what a publication date meant. Silly me.

Posted by Guy at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2005

Funny Nets and Interesting Interfaces

Something seems funny with the network interface on the Mini-ITX when restoring from hibernate. It looks like everything starts up (net.eth0 and sshd) but I can't connect from another machine. More checking needed.

In evaluating alternative interfaces I ran across xiron [sourceforge.net] which led me to oxine [sourceforge.net]. This led me to thinking that maybe I don't need a full up interface but something that would ride on xine. We'll see.

Posted by Guy at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 24, 2005

Graphical Interface

I'm still unsettled about what to use for the main interface of the multimedia system. I thought about using PyGame [pygame.org], but I really don't know much about Python. I've taken a quick look at it and it seems a really simple structured language, but I think I want something I'm more familiar with. Also, something that has a little more flexibility.

Assuming that PyGame is not being used then I might as well use SDL [libsdl.org]. This is what PyGame uses under the covers and I've played with it in the past. I did find something interesting when creating some test programs. Under Gentoo (at least the invarnation I'm running) you must initialize the Event Thread by passing in SDL_INIT_EVENTTHREAD to SDL_Init. When I checked the docs there was no real mention of this flag except that it didn't work under Win32 (I think).

Well, back to creating graphics and testing SDL functionality.

Posted by Guy at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

DVD Playback

I tested some DVD playback today and the CPU was running in between 32% and 78% under Xine. I'm not quite sure why this was so high. I thought that using XvMC playback was only supposed to consume 20% to 30%. I checked Xine's settings and changed the video to explicitly use XvMC with the same crappy results. So, more testing tomorrow.

Posted by Guy at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 21, 2005

Playing Movies

So I got avi, mp4 and DVDs playing through Xine. It looks great, sound is great (at least through the headphones) and CPU utilization looks good. I'm using the drivers for X.org from the Unichrome Project [Sourceforge.net] and the DRM modules from the DRI Project [freedesktop.org]. All this running under a non-standard install of Gentoo on kernel 2.6.11.7. The Gentoo install is non-standard because I built and installed some packages myself and injected them into portage. I also use a patched version of the kernel allowing me to use Suspend2 [Suspend2.net] and the VT1211 sensors.

Suspend2 looks like it's working fine, even under X, but I haven't tried the sensor stuff yet. I also haven't tried the TVOut yet. The first time I tried using TVOut it didn't work out so well. I think X was trying to find modeline settings that would work for both the CRT and TV...I still don't know, but we'll see later this week. After I get the TV working I think I'll start on some kind of UI for the system.

Posted by Guy at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)