Ol Sabz is goin carputer

[Sabz5150]

Scored a tiny PC from a friend of mine who went to some office store closeout and picked this up for free. Seems to be an older POS machine. Anyway, it is an older box, I can probably cram a K6-2 in there with buku amounts of RAM. It'll play mp3's, tune in TV or radio and play divx files if I tune it properly. I still have the Harmon Kardon digital out gadget so I can run both analog and digital straight to the processor. Time to ditch the headunit.

I'll throw up some pics later :cheers:

[MessyHonda]

you should go amd xp althlon... i have like 3 mobos for thoes but they are full size ones... i also got a 2800+ sempron that i got on sell for only 74 bucks like a year ago...its still closed in box. DDR ram is way better. you can get like 512 for like 30 bucks online.

[3G Jester]

mp3car.com has lots of info...but a****le users. ill have my carputer in by this weekend!!!

[Sabz5150]

you should go amd xp althlon... i have like 3 mobos for thoes but they are full size ones... i also got a 2800+ sempron that i got on sell for only 74 bucks like a year ago...its still closed in box. DDR ram is way better. you can get like 512 for like 30 bucks online.

I'm using what I have at the moment. Once I get everything settled in I'll look for a more powerful system. I'm not sure what frontend I am going to use, need something slim, fast, and customizable. Tuning Linux for this is gonna be lots of fun... probably borderline embedded. Gonna check out Project Utopia for device recognition and filesystem mounting (g/f sticks in her iPod Shuffle and it plays the files straight from the internal storage. Bye bye FM modulators.)

The thing will be purpose built, extremely tight. I plan on running the OS and its apps from a CF card. Much faster and shock and vibration are no problems. USB ports up front for drives and mp3 players.

It's gonna be a task.

[Sabz5150]

http://www.enginevoodoo.com/images/carpc/carpc1.jpg

http://www.enginevoodoo.com/images/carpc/carpc2.jpg

Tiny lil thing.

http://www.enginevoodoo.com/images/carpc/carpc3.jpg

What else would I install? :)

http://www.enginevoodoo.com/images/carpc/carpc4.jpg

Looks sharp already. It's quick but I need a real slim web browser. Firefox makes it slooooooooooooooow.

[MessyHonda]

wow old school acer...my uncle has the AMD turion laptop from them and the only thing that sucks is the graphics card...but everything else is alright. i also have the Acer 19 inch monitor with 8ms this monitor does not lag in any game. thats cool that you knoe linux... i have like 4 or 5 computers i should put linux in one of them.. thats cool that you have firefox...i had it since like .99 came out back in 04

[Sabz5150]

wow old school acer...my uncle has the AMD turion laptop from them and the only thing that sucks is the graphics card...but everything else is alright. i also have the Acer 19 inch monitor with 8ms this monitor does not lag in any game. thats cool that you knoe linux... i have like 4 or 5 computers i should put linux in one of them.. thats cool that you have firefox...i had it since like .99 came out back in 04

I'm a Linux using nut :) All of my systems run it.

Since Firefox is open source, I am sure there is a version that has all the fat trimmed that will do the job I am setting out to accomplish.

[Vanilla Sky]

i'm a fan of opera now that firefox turned buggy and bloated. i still haven't given the newer update a shot, but i've been running opera for a bit over a month with no problems.

and i've never seen a POS system with a CD drive. could have been an accounting compy. either way, have you found out what it does have? it may be new enough to be P2. never know. if it takes older RAM, i'll toss some in that box of goodies.

[HostileJava]

mp3car.com has lots of info...but a****le users. ill have my carputer in by this weekend!!!

That's quick. Did you get all the crap cleaned out of it?

[Sabz5150]

Realistically with a K6/2, newer builds of Firefox (Dependancies on GTK2, later resource hogging revisions of Gecko, et al) will run like complete shit.

I have run Firefox rather well on a K6-2 400. I didn't expect it to be lightning fast but it didn't chug and make the machine collapse under its weight.


If you want a Gecko/Mozilla rendering based browser with similar capabilities, check out Galeon.

Definitely want a browser with the gecko engine. No two ways about that.


Obviously if you continue to want to run X (Even though it'd be pointless in a small LCD screen) you'll want to run a lightweight WM.

X serves its purpose. It'll probably be on a 5 or 6 inch display, so I can install/make a snazzy little frontend for it. I am considering flwm as my WM of choice. I had that thing flying on a 486/66 several years back so I know it will have no problems running in the confined space of this system. The picture above is of it running DamnSmall which uses Fluxbox and as long as you kill all the pointless eye candy, it runs great.


Personally, I'd setup automounting scripts and use mplayer over a framebuffer to display movies and whatnot. Less resources.

Automounting, of course. Framebuffer... not so much. I'll need to plug in a newer PCI video card (probably a geForce of some sort) just for its S-Video outputs. nVidia's drivers are top notch and never give me issues. That and they know how to take advantage of all the little goodies that a geForce can offer.

Right now its a project in the works. As I goof with it and tune it I will have a better idea of what precisely needs to be done. One of the things I am looking at is a Realmagic Xcard. It's one of the few hardware DiVX decoder cards out there and will definitely help out playing video files encoded in high resolutions. From the looks of it, I can swipe my Svid output straight off of that. It also has a coax digital out, eliminating the need for the HK sound adapter I was going to run for DTS.

Wifi... of course. Kismet + Festival + this lil box = :D Just toss in a PCI wireless card (that and the xcard eat both my slots) and put an antenna or two on the trunk. Lots of potential there.

[Sabz5150]

I've decided that lmbox is the best frontend for this, given its customizability and speed.

http://www.crystalballinc.com/vlad/software/lmbox/lmbox1.jpg

http://www.crystalballinc.com/vlad/software/lmbox/lmbox2.jpg

http://www.crystalballinc.com/vlad/software/lmbox/weather.jpg

http://www.crystalballinc.com/vlad/software/lmbox/news.jpg

Setting up emulators and possibly satnav should be a snap.

[MessyHonda]

looks cool...how much would internet cost to put in a car....my friend has a sidekick with unlimited web...wonder if you can hook it up to the computer and get internet to check on the forums...lol

[Sabz5150]

looks cool...how much would internet cost to put in a car....my friend has a sidekick with unlimited web...wonder if you can hook it up to the computer and get internet to check on the forums...lol

Absolutely. The only other Linux carputer I have seen did that. The phone and the system had bluetooth and whenever he got in the car, it would make a connection. He frontended with Myth which gave him so much functionality. Being able to watch DirecTV in his car has to be the best one (Myth allows watching live TV over the network... any system that has a tuner can shoot its output to another system) as well as the obligatory shoutcast streaming audio.

Once ya get to know it, Linux is so much more powerful than Windows, especially in a purpose built system such as a carputer.