Well, nothing much has been happening lately, i’ve done some work for Shock Radio (www.shockradio.co.uk), the student RSL radio station i used to manage. Theres a couple of things worth mentioning there -
Diskless Booting Gentoo
Using pxelinux i managed to build a network bootable diskless client – all without having gentoo installed anywhere to start with – i had to boot using the live/install cd, mount the NFS target disk and build directly onto that! Then once i got it to the studio i realised i had built the kernel without support for the network card, so a quick re-compile later (with the aid of the live cd it worked perfectly…until it crashed – but that was a hardware fault.
A word from the wise though – the compile time purely for X, Thunderbird and Firefox on a PII 350 is about 5 days straight!
Compaq ML* servers
If you’re planning on getting one of these (since they go on ebay for very cheap) make sure you know about the SmartStart CD – you NEED to have this or you cannot setup the disks – forget a bios – it doesn’t have a conventional one, the only way to setup the system is using the special bootable cd – which by the way, is a 500meg download from the Compaq/HP website.
I’ve been doing some more work on the car/pc – i have discovered someone who managed to build a CD Multichanger Emulator – this clever bit of hardware allows you to talk to pioneer headunits directly over serial – including CD Text and controls from the headunit. This means i can use this to interface between the headunit im planning to buy and the laptop allowing full control through it.
There’s other emulators out there for other makes of headunit, but i like the pioneers. I’ve also picked up a DC-DC adaptor for the power side so once i get that in, i can get rid of the inverter all together which will be nice, i may eventually build it back in since having 230V in the car is quite useful.
That’s it for now really, not all that much to report, hopefully i will have a few new things to do after christmas.