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Nic MP3 playing distribution

I'm pretty much done with this. If people send me thanks, bug listings or wish lists, I may do more.

Newest update as of 16/9/00

In the spirit of never leaving good enough alone, I've just rebuilt the mp3 distro to use xmms. Weighing in at a svelte 20 megs, this version supports xmms, web browser & networking support.
Xmms is great, since skins actually work, playlist support is stable, and now it's possible to plug in a variety of IR and other remote control devices. Most importantly, the streaming support is much better than the previous gqmpeg setup.

Older announcement from 14/9/00
I'd like to announce a new and vastly improved version of my NIC mp3 player cd. It now features:

  1. The latest beta of gqmpeg
  2. Ethernet support (dhcp there but untested)
  3. Mouse enabled web browsing through w3m
  4. Some documentation
  5. Playlists can now be saved to flash memory.
  6. A new 2.18-3 kernel that supports joliette & supermount.
  7. Now using Blackbox for the window manager.
  8. Most importantly, the backspace key works.
There are some rough edges, most irritating is the fact that loading streaming audio via the web browser just barely works. Gqmpeg just recently started supporting streaming playlists, and the plugin is a hack that I expanded on. Frequently just typing a displayed but non-playing URL into a new playlist will make it work. Either Perl or freeamp or xmms would solve the problem, but all of those are larger than the entire distro.

This release adds ethernet support, and enough tools that you should be able to use this as a crude sort of an xterminal

Since this release mounts the flash disk read-write, it is now possible to screw up your flash system with it. This distribution *should* be as well behaved as the shipping cd, but you could still fill up the flash, erase things you didn't intend to, etc. Consider yourself warned.

If you have questions, contact nic@tenhand.com. I GLADLY accept bugfixes. I'd intended to do more with this sooner.

Distribution Releases

You will need a CDrom burner to do anything useful with these. If you just want to get going, download the ISO image. If you know how to use bzip2, please download that copy. After you've downloaded it, you should be able to just burn the CD using Adaptec tools or cdrecord. A nice person emailed me a windows compatible copy of bunzip2 . I haven't virus checked it or tried it out, YMMV.

Third release, 16/9/00

Readme.html for this version
ISO image, ready to burn (19M)
ISO image, compressed with bzip2 (7.6M)
If you don't need the CD ISO , or want to tweak the image before burning a copy, download this .tgz of all of the files. This doesn't include source for the binaries, since you can get that faster at dozens of places on the net. tarball of the cd files (7.6Mb)

Second release, 14/9/00

(removed to save disk space, go with number 3 or number 1 instead))

Initial release, 17/8/00

ISO image, ready to burn (15M)
ISO image, compressed with bzip2 (6.5M)
tarball of the cd files (16.5Mb)

How this works

This is a 16 meg ramdisk distribution for the NIC. It runs X and xmms, so it looks fairly nice. There's a couple of megs free, so it's easy to add more tools.

It boots by loading a 18 meg initrc filesystem that only contains tar, mount, hdparm & ash. The linuxrc then mounts the cd and untars /cdrom/root.tar .After a few delays, it drops into X. You can now eject the boot cd, and insert cdroms full of mp3s.

TODO


support smbmount &/or nfs mount options.
I tried to get a cd player on as well, but the cd players seem to hang while finding the drive. I suspect that's linked to the lilo/HDparm settings for the cd drive.
Trim down the pixmaps. (using strace?)

Cool dreams

USB webcam server option. I tried using USB in the 2.pre-18 kernel, but it didn't work first try, so I set it aside.