Where does this wire go?

It was a fun day today.  My wife and I went to a carpc meeting to meet up with some people from the mp3car.com forums.  The attendance seems to be growing as we had 5 cars and 7 people show up.  Granted one of the people that went was my wife who just smiled and put up with the geeks.

We sat in the parking lot we met up at for an hour or so looking at each others setups and hung out and chatted for about an hour.  We then got in to our vehicles and caravaned over to the park for the BBQ.

ViViper1 supplied pretty much all the food.  We had loads of fun trying to cook it though.  We couldn’t get the charcoals to stay lit.  We had heavy winds which made even lighting a lighter difficult.

After what seemed hours we got the food on the grill and a little while later we were eating dogs and burgers.

We sat around and talked about car computers, cars,  and just stuff in general for about 3 hours and walked back to the cars.

We sat at the cars for a few minutes while people looked at my hybrid just to see what was under the hood.  After that it was a quite ride home as we listened to steaming music on the carpc.

Here are the few photos that I took.

lburton and ViViper1 cooking burgers

lburton and ViViper1 cooking burgers

ratio of lighter fluid to coals? About 1/2 can to 15 coals.

ratio of lighter fluid to coals? About 1/2 can to 15 coals.

lburton, rogerdugans, Eileen(my wife), and f1vlad

lburton, rogerdugans, Eileen(my wife), and f1vlad

Pictures from rogerdugans

I created a page to day with some pictures of my car and carputer set up. My carputer and car pictures.

Today I received my usb evdo card from Millenicom. They are a reseller of Verizon mobile broadband. The reason I went with them is that there is no contract.

One reason for having this card is internet radio stations when I’m driving. Another is to be able to check e-mail or surf the web when I’m at a place where I don’t have internet access.

When I log in as root nghost functions okay execept it doesn’t display my music list.

When I log in as a user, nghost doesn’t seem to want to accept input. When I click on a menu item nghost doesn’t seem to do anything.

If I could get nghost working again I’d be super happy. I may have to recompile it or something. I’m not really sure whats up.

It is working flawlessly. The calibration stays even when I power off the unit and power it back on. I used this egalax page to get me an idea of what to do. I did as he did and copied the /usr/share/hal/fdi/50-eGalax.fdi file and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/policy.

I then looked at /etc/evtouch/config for the parameters of my calibration (I had previously successfully calibrated my touchscreen.) I used those values (well just the MINX,MINY,MAXX,MAXY) in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/50-eGalax.fdi.

This was a tough task to accomplish and I thought I was going to have to settle on having to reboot when I lost power to the screen. I am glad I found that link. I hope others find it useful as well.

Today after the mp3car gathering I dropped by my brothers house to work with him on his arcade cabinet his making. Well, we were waiting for the glue to set up so I took him out to show him the carputer. When I booted up the os said it needed to be checked. Did I want to check it, and that it could be dangerous to check on a mounted system. I figured. What the heck. I’ve done it before. Well, this time was the time it was dangerous. When I rebooted Grub had a fit. The O/S was completely gone (I’m sure if I really wanted to I could have recovered from this.)

Since I wasn’t terribly happy with the ext3 filesystem I used this as an excuse to load the latest ubuntu on the drive with the jfs filesystem.

Everything went flawlessly. Now I just have to start rebuilding the system with the apps I want on it.

I added a line like this to my touchscreen drivers section in xorg.conf

Option “CorePointer”

I’m so happy with this. The system is only inches away from being fully functional.

I don’t know how interesting it will be to people. But I think it looks pretty cool. I still have to clean up the install as you can see. But overall I think it looks okay.

carpc

Well, I decided to use a new kernel. So while all the software is still installed, I have no networking and I’m sure there are other kernel modules I’m missing that need to be recompiled as well.

Hopefully I’ll get the networking up tomorrow which will speed up the rest of the process.