![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
About two years ago I bought a Virgin Webplayer (pdf), a small "internet appliance." A couple of months ago I threw in a hard drive, some RAM, and installed RedHat 7.3 on it. I got the system basically working, though the terminalization was all screwed up and X never worked.
This weekend I was inspired to work on this system again. I wiped the drive, installed RedHat 8.0, and got to work. I was successful, and am posting this entry from my webplayer : )
So after doing some websearching I found that using the framebuffer console would be much more effective. I set that up in GRUB, and was able to get X to work pretty easily. Of coure, I hadn't installed Gnome or KDE, so I was stuck using TWM until I got WindowMaker working. Mozilla technically works, but it's really slow.
The next step was getting sound working. The normal soundblaster emulation driver wasn't working, but I found that if I passed mpu_io=0 and isapnp=0 (no ISA on the system at all) to the module when I loaded it, all was good. I wrote a little init script for starting and stopping sound too, whee.
I installed LogJam (GTK livejournal client), and am compiling XMMS now. I can play mp3s with mpg123 as long as I'm not doing anything else on the system, otherwise it tends to skip a lot, even though it's only using ~40% of the cpu. I suppose it might be overloading the IO... There are some settings I can tweak to make that a bit better, I have them written down in my RedHat training book.
So yeah, it works, I am amused. The original plan was to put this system in my kitchen to play music, surf for recipes with. I'll probably do that for the couple of months that I'm going to be here... Who knows what I'll do with it in Seattle.
This weekend I was inspired to work on this system again. I wiped the drive, installed RedHat 8.0, and got to work. I was successful, and am posting this entry from my webplayer : )
So after doing some websearching I found that using the framebuffer console would be much more effective. I set that up in GRUB, and was able to get X to work pretty easily. Of coure, I hadn't installed Gnome or KDE, so I was stuck using TWM until I got WindowMaker working. Mozilla technically works, but it's really slow.
The next step was getting sound working. The normal soundblaster emulation driver wasn't working, but I found that if I passed mpu_io=0 and isapnp=0 (no ISA on the system at all) to the module when I loaded it, all was good. I wrote a little init script for starting and stopping sound too, whee.
I installed LogJam (GTK livejournal client), and am compiling XMMS now. I can play mp3s with mpg123 as long as I'm not doing anything else on the system, otherwise it tends to skip a lot, even though it's only using ~40% of the cpu. I suppose it might be overloading the IO... There are some settings I can tweak to make that a bit better, I have them written down in my RedHat training book.
So yeah, it works, I am amused. The original plan was to put this system in my kitchen to play music, surf for recipes with. I'll probably do that for the couple of months that I'm going to be here... Who knows what I'll do with it in Seattle.
