Haiku!

I installed Haiku R1Alpha2 onto my desktop PC* last night. I've not tried it for a little while, and you know what? It's completely usable! All the basics work, and work well. Video, sound, power management, networking etc. My TV card doesn't work (WinTV PVR-150) and neither does my bluetooth dongle, but it's as usable now as BeOS R5 was (with slightly limited application support, I can't get some of my old favourites to work; BePac gives an error about fonts, SoundPlay says something's missing).

I'm really looking forward to using this full time. I have a ThinkPad X30 which should run it quite well too :-) I'd better get to helping them out and fixing some bugs! (I'll start small)

I miss BeOS, Haiku's reminded me how awesome it was. The new WebPositive browser has made quite a difference too, it's much better than NetPositive was, and more stable than FireFox.

*It's an AMD Athlon XP if you're curious, 640MB DDR RAM, 80Gb PATA HD, ATI Radeon 9520 (I think)

mbed

I recently acquired an mbed board. This is a great little board, I got it up and running some little demos in no time at all. There's no software to install to use it as everything's done online. I can see great things for this in future projects.
It's a great system for testing things, ensuring code works and just playing around, but if I wanted to make something production-worthy then I'd prefer to make my own board up I think. I'll see how I go with it, hopefully I won't blow it up. The replacement cost isn't as small as a simple PIC!

PCB!

I just etched my first PCB! Used FeCl2 as my etchant, toner transfer to get the design onto the board. As you can see from the picture it's not brilliant, but hey, it's a start!

Neostation 3000: OS Again

After trying a number of different operating systems for the thin client, I tried DamnSmallLinux (DSL), which is a brilliant little operating system, and most importantly of all, everything on the thin client works! I did a full install to a 4GB CompactFlash card which I had spare, and it's working brilliantly. I'll upload some screenshots at some point I'm sure.

Set up like this it makes a lovely little desktop for light development work, blogging and listening to internet radio.

Neostation 3000: OS

So, as I stated before, I decided to use Linux. How did I decide on this I hear you ask? Why aren't you using BSD? How about an old version of Windows?
All of these questions, and more, did I ask myself. What of the answers? Well I'll explain that here.

From my initial information, I had only found people running embedded Linux or BSD (which can be tiny) on these boxes, so I first tried BSD.
BSD is great. It's nice to use real UNIX, stable and quite fast. But I had problems. As the site before suggested, there's lots of IRQ issues. I initially thought that they were due to the hardware, but I then tried something I didn't really want to. I installed Windows 98.

Windows 98 is... Windows 98. I don't think I can say much else about it, and I'm not sure I'd want to. I'm not here to bash it, however, as it provided me with something very important. It provided me with the knowledge that all the hardware, with the right drivers (look for drivers for the Virgin Webplayer, it's the same chipset) works. Now this is important in that I now know that I can boot up and install an OS from a CD-ROM on the same IDE bus, and then configure everything to
work. I even put an old version of QuickTime on and played the sample movie flawlessly. So that works.

Why did I decide on Linux then? Well I'm used to it, and I can easily set it up to do what I want. Sure it's more stable than 98, but so is a unicycle. 98 might make a reappearance if I decide to flash an OS to the DiskOnChip.

Before deciding on Linux, I tried to use BeOS. BeOS is brilliant, media-centric and supports the chipset. Interestingly, the chipset was for embedded applications (no surprise, this was a thin client after all). Unfortunatly, although the BeOS installer ran, and installation completed, the drive wouldn't boot. I might revisit this at some point and try again, but the bootloader just kept failing to find the boot drive.

So, what to conclude? Linux is currently the best choice, but there are a few other options left (Perhaps QNX, maybe even plain FreeDOS?). We shall see!

Neostation 3000: Audio....

As I said, this thing is quirky to say the least. It's based on a Geode processor, which is good enough for mp3 decoding and the like, but the audio circuitry is terrible!

I initially suspected that the CPU might not be up to decoding the MP3s, but after thinking about it for a little bit I realised that no, that can't be the case. After overclocking it by 33Mhz (not much I know, but it's fanless and dangerously easy to do) and seeing no real performance difference I decided to whack in a PCI sound card and see what happened. I had a CMI8737 based card sitting on my desk with a slightly dodgy output jack, popped it in and booted into the BIOS to disable onboard.

Annoyingly however, the larger RAM slot is in the way, so to put the card in place I had to remove my second stick of RAM... I'll post pictures soon so you can see what I mean. In my final project I expect to use a PCI riser of some sort to fix that. Perhaps something link this:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10574

Anyway, after swapping audio to the PCI card rather than onboard, the sound is fantastic. xmms2 is playing audio without skipping a beat. top says it's using 70-80% of the CPU doing it, but that's fine.

Neostation 3000

I bought two of these with the idea to use one as a little server and the other as an internet radio/music streaming box.

I saw them first on ebay, and a little googling let me to a few sites of people playing with them, such as these:

http://www.wedothose.co.uk/neostation3000.html

http://www.enicomms.com/neostation3k/

The first of these sites in particular suggested that the hardware was a little strange. I am certainly in agreement with that, to be honest. Although I have tried a number of operating systems on this box, and have decided that the best is Linux, but with a few quirks...

I'll post more as the project unfolds!