A lot has happened in my life since I wrote in this thing last time. My father passed away, as well as one of my best friends. I had one of the most amazing girlfriends in the world, and then the relationship ended after about 8 months.

I finished my jukebox, and moved onto making my own PVR. Both of these projects look like they are nearly done, or very much near it. They are usable at this point, which is what I am most concerned with.

I realized that I have been living in this hole of an aparment for 5 years and being overcharged for rent on a place like this. So, it is time to move out. I am ready to make the plunge, and with some help, I am getting some land a little west of here, and getting a house built.

Spent the better part of the weekend doing 2 things: working with an architect on my design, and getting a realtor to find land out by Front Royal, VA. I don't want to leave this region, and this is about as far out as I want to go to live comfortably.

The house design (dubbed "The Devin Model") is very nice. About 1900 sq. ft., with a lot of open spaces inside, 9 ft. ceilings, 2 car garage, and a 20'5"x15'4" master bedroom. Hooray for space! I guess that this says something about myself: that there are many things in life that I want that may seem big and complex, but in reality are quite simple.

Land will be a bit of problem finding for cost, but I don't think it will be too big of a deal. I have someone helping me out in that department, someone with more financial clout than I would probably ever have, so that makes it easier.

I thought I'd put something else in here. Still paring down RH 8 for the jukebox. And at the same time, still learning the ins and outs of essentially building your own distribution. Not as hard as I thought in some cases.

For the time being, I'm testing it all out using a bootable CD. This may turn out to be a permanent fixture in the system, so I can upgrade it quickly without any messy reinstalls.

Playing with RedHat 8.0. I like it, actually. But just in case I wouldn't like it, I also had Debian on hand.

The only problem was getting it to stop recognizing my onboard i810 video board and getting it to work with my ATI Radeon. Fortunately, all was made good after a quick hack through XF86Config.

I'm stripping packages for my MP3 jukebox project. uClibc is mighty, and so is BusyBox. I don't care if I've got 700MB of space on a CD for this stuff; it's still going to be lean and mean.

Made a little progress today. Started assembling together all of the packages. I've ditched Apache for something a little smaller and more geared towards MP3 players via web.

I think this version might be slimmed down a little bit just for testing.

RAM came in. Installed it all. Went back and completely redesigned the distro to something a little more manageable.

Now I have to find a power cord extender for the internal power supply. I love it when the engineers design internal power supply cables that don't even reach to the other side of the chassis.ARGH! It's frustrating sometimes!

On a lighter note though, I found a nice little web server designed just for this kind of thing. But, the damn interface looks hideous. Oh well. I guess it wouldn't be fun if you just stuck tab A into slot B.

Also helping a friend through a nervous breakdown, which is taking me away from this a little more than I'd like.

Built up most of the system this weekend. Got the hard drive, case, motherboard, and CD drive.

I have it on my "lab" table right now underneath a blue sheet. Makes for a good conversation piece when friends come over. They ask,"What is that?" and I say,"Oh that? That's just the monster I'm working on. I don't have all of the body parts in yet. You'll see it soon enough anyway."

Thinking about putting all of the modified tools, code, and kernel image up together as another distribution, since most of the efforts out there I've seen don't offer that, just a "here's what I did" thing.

Soon though, it will be done. And I can get all of my MP3s off all my computers to one place where I can get at them!

I also thought about trying to use up that parallel port with a Nomad interface, because my friend has one, and would probably like to use it when I'm done.

Been planning out my home stereo component MP3 player. I'm calling it the Pentak Jab. Yep, I'm a Farscape fan. I've already got my Linux kernel compiled and the hardware is trickling in slowly.

I realize that things like this exist, and I can fork over some cash to get something, but it won't be exactly what I want, and I can't easily modify it.
Here's the breakdown of the hardware:

PII - 400MHz

256MB RAM

Chaintech 6SSA Motherboard (micro ATX)

60GB HDD

Still thinking about a 20x4 LCD display

3COM 3C905-TX NIC

Yep, the hardware isn't anything too impressive, but it is quite adequate for what I want to do with it. I'm using the 2.4.18 kernel, compiled on a Red Hat system. Here's what I wanted to get it to do:

Apache Web Server interface for playlist control, uploading, etc.

CD ripping and encoding (got the tools and a Perl script to make them seamless)

Serial Terminal interface for diagnostics and direct commands

FTP Server for batch uploads

Maybe serve up the MP3s through the web server for downloads on the LAN?

Not sure what else I want to put on it at the moment. IR control with LIRC has crossed my mind also, but that may come later. If anybody wants, they can leave suggestions about this.

Also, I've been reading up on the docs for this, but I want to know if anyone's had any experience burning "El Torito" CDs that install a system on a hard drive, and if so, how they got it to install LILO, the kernel, etc. and what tools they used, if any to get it to work.

I guess I'll start writing in this thing. It really is good knowing I have this up here though.