On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Rob Leslie wrote:
Tom wrote:
- Whats an easy way to time things on the empeg via a script file? Best
way I can think of is a simple loop script with a pause, but I can't figure out a pause function.
`sleep' is probably what you're looking for, although the developer image doesn't include it. You'd either have to build your own binary or snarf a copy from the Debian ARM distribution (or bug someone else to send it to you :-)
Ahh, thanks. I wasn't sure what it was, I kept trying "delay, wait, pause, and sleep" with no luck. Sleep worked on my linux server, but I was assuming it was a part of the shell.
Next question is how do I wait for a process to stop before contuining a script? On startup, I want cenrtain things to happen while the startup sound is playing, like the setup of the ramdrive. I grabbed pidof, but for some reason my pidof /bin/pcmplay | wait just keeps on going, and the player hates to start when the pcmplay program is still going. (Almost had to reupgrade the unit to get out of a bad loop).
- Is there a way that I can shrink the ramdrive? It's much bigger then I
need it to be for the buffers, but the only way I have found is to recompile the kernel. Not fun if you plan on releasing something that depends on a modification to the kernel.
Not sure about this one... I haven't played with RAM disks very much.
You're tackling an interesting problem. There are plenty of reasons to want writeable filesystems, but the possibility of power loss at any moment is a concern. I think I like the RAM disk solution, although RAM on the empeg is in pretty limited supply.
Amazingly enough, the player is handleing it well. The ram drive, D.Net client, player and bash ran stable for 24 hours. But memory was very tight. Thats why I want the ramdrive shrunk, since I think it's wasting almost 3 megs of memory. Now that I know the command to pause, I'll write a basic thing tonight to test the stability with that running.
I still want to find out how the player deals with disk writes. Maybe with a push, we can get a developer partition allocated to us that survives the upgrade process. That way we can have similar "scratch" space that the player uses for active playlists. The empeg is definitly an open platform that needs to be exploited more, as I really want my empeg to be an in car computer that I can tweak. The AutoPC is cool in it's functionality, but I don't see a WinCE SDK being freely available anytime soon. The empeg only requires a terminal program, and has the empeg developers available for questions.
Tom