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Re: stereo component from laptop?



Matt Price wrote:

Hopefully this is still of interest to the list, if not I'll move off
line next time...

likewise - I'm not sure, for one thing its not to do with debian (its a custom system, built using gentoo if it interests anyone) but its to do with laptops. Ill keep it here for now.

On 12/1/05, Ognjen Bezanov <ognjen@mailshack.com> wrote:
Matt Price wrote:
huh, this is very interesting.  I would love to get the .img file --
not exactly sure what a .img file is, but I have used files with this
extension to start up qemu so I assumethis is some kind of disk
image...  At the least itwould be something to referto as Im building
this up.



the .img is essentially a disk image, you can read from a disk to a .img
file:

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/file.img

or vice-versa:

dd if=/path/to/file.img

Also in linux you can mount the file and use it as you would a normal disk:

mount -t [filesystem] /path/to/file.img /mount/point -o loop

I'm trying to test this out before installing it.  I can get the image
to boot in qemu thus:

qemu -boot c -hda sounderver.img -hdb qemu.img

where qemu.img is a bank image produced as per qemu's instructions.

qemu? what exactly is it. Is it an emulator? can I run other linux systems in it - does it use the host kernel or its own? in which case I should have known that earlier, it would have made my life debugging this system sooo much easier.

however, it doesn't seem to do much and in particular I can't seem to open a vt
to check out what's going on...   Instead I am stuck at an interesting
command prompt with a few lines of text (Welcometothe ESD server...
etc).

This may be intentional? for the stripped-down serverness of it. Then tried investigating thusly:

Yep, it doesn't open a terminal, for me it wasn't required (but perhaps it may be better to add one, I havent got round to it yet, but if I do, beware it will be quite limited in its use), on the prompt it should tell you the ip address and port to connect to. Also during startup you should hear a quick melody play (as a sign that the system is properly initialised and that it detected the soundcard). Hence make sure your computer is plugged in / speakers are turned up :).

If you do not get this, try looking at the messages on your screen (r-shift + pgUp/pgDown) to see if its detecting the soundcard. if not, then you probably will need to recompile the kernel for your
soundcard.

If you did hear it, then it should be all ok, try connecting to the system with a client (e.g. xmms esound plugin).

The problem is that in my quest for the smallest possible system, I probably stripped all the kernel stuff out except what was in my laptop (an old cirrus logic soundcard, an atheros wifi card, and a NE2000 ethernet pcmcia card).

sudo mount -t ext2 -o loop soundserver.img /mnt/soundserver/

but it won't mount, giving a "wrong fs" error of the kind I've
sometimes seen when forgetting to add "-t iso9660" while attempting to
mount a cd.  so not sure whether I'm doing something wrong, or whether
perhaps you use a special fs (reiser?)

the problem with this image file is that it has its mbr and bootloader built-in (i.e. this image is meant for burning to a proper disk drive first, until someone works out how to skip the bootloader directly).

This is not a pure fs-image, hence it cannot be mounted like that. I'm sure there is a way though (i just dont know how).

Essentially what you are instructing your computer to do is mount grub as /mnt/soundserver, which won't work.

The image layout looks like this:

[ mbr [grub stage 1] ][grub stage 2][============ ext2 root fs ==============]

and when you try to mount it, it looks in the mbr/grub area for a filesystem, doesnt find one, and returns an error.

The Filesystem I use is ext2.

so anyway, if you get this, let me know if you have any suggestions!

well, if you (or anyone on this mailing list) knows how to skip the boot part of the .img file and mount the 1st partition (the rootfs) directly let me know.

Another way is if you have a drive (e.g. USB memory key/ hard disk) lying about. Provided its greater then 16mb you can dd the image file to that, and then mount /dev/hdx1 as ext2.

If there is no way, I can send you the filesystem as an img file seperately (which you can mount), but then you will have to install grub yourself on the drive for it to boot on its own.

thanks,

matt


Oh, and feel free to contact me if you need help! :)








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