[pocket-linux] burnt some midnight oil ...

[David Horton]

Rainer wrote:
> hello,
> 
> in college we we used to call  the all-nighter the melitta shift and i swore
> to myself that i would hear some mp3s last night ...

I'm assuming that Melitta refers to the coffee company?  That would make 
sense anyway.  Douwe Egbert is pretty good too.  Best stuff I've ever 
had from a cafeteria machine anyway.


> 
> since the script ran fine on the build system i knew that wasn't the
> problem. racked my brain for a solution. realised usr-staging wasn't that
> large and could fit uncompressed on a 'overclocked' floppy. took me an hour
> to figure out the /dev/fd0u1600 technique (those man pages really aren't
> that helpful sometimes), copied user-staging to it, answered 'no' for the
> last floppy and manually created /dev/ram1 as outlined in the guide,
> formatted, mounted, mounted floppy (added device fd0u1600 to the root disk),
> and copied /mnt/floppy to /usr.

Interesting solution.  I had not thought of that.


  then mp3blaster complained about librairies
> (used the latest version, 3.13. i believe). copied all the vorbis libraries
> to my /home floppy, unmounted /dev/fd0u, mounted /dev/fd0, copied the
> missing libs. to /usr/lib and bingo. i think it was fitting that the first
> thing i heard was linus pronouncing linux ... now how do you get a whole
> folder of mp3s into mp3blaster ....

If you want to play a boatload of music at once I would suggest buring a 
CD-ROM of your favorites.  You can mount 650M of music on /home instead 
of 1.44M of Linus talking.  Nothing against Linus.  :^)  As far as 
loading it all into mp3blaster I usually create and load an .m3u 
playlist to do that.


> 
> i know this was cheating but it highlights the fact that Pocket Linux had
> enough tools on it to do all this. looked back at the design section of the
> appendix and the usr_script and i'm wondering about the state of /dev/ram1,
> i.e. does it need to be formatted if the image is decompressed before being
> copied to it?, which the outline/script seems to imply. this is all pretty
> mind-boggoling to me

Actually you probably don't need to zero out /dev/ram1 before 
decompressing the image.  I think that snuck in since I was reverse 
engineering the ramdisk building process where it is necessary to zero 
it out.


> 
> anyhow, had a gas, one terminal playing mp3s, one with the goddam mp3blaster
> commands, one looking over the usr_image script, one open to /home on
> /dev/fd0 for sasving stuff, ...
> who needs a monster distro when you got a lightening fast system in ram?
> thanks.
> 
> ps - minor typo, i think, in A3.3.3, second to last line;
>     bash# cd  ~/usr/staging/share/terminfo/l
>         should read
>     bash# cd ~/usr-staging/share/terminfo/l
> 
> 

Good catch on the typo, I'll make a note to fix that in the next release.


I'm glad you had fun with it and thanks for the enthusiastic review.

Dave