Fun with Mini-ITX

[mdlbear]

So I have the little motherboard I bought last week up and running in a breadboard configuration: almost literally; it's currently attached to a 12-inch piece of 1x8 with drywall screws. The power supply and disk drive are currently sitting loose on the board. The main objective of the breadboarding exercise was to do space planning for a smaller case, e.g an 8-inch cube.

RedHat 7.3 is now happily installed, and I'm now adding the Planet CCRMA audio stuff. The only problems were a bad CD-ROM drive (could have sworn I'd written a note on the bad one...) and a flaky RAM (what do you expect at $20 for 256Mb; fortunately I bought two).

We'll see how it's doing when I get home from work tonight. Then I'll install the rest of the audio stuff, and maybe wrap a few more pieces of wood around it.

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

Bolt everything to wood.

Hinge the boards so it folds up hiding what it is.

Arrive at location and unlatch and unfold or just plug the power and mic in.

Yup!

[mdlbear]

I'm now trying to decide about form factor: 8" cube (cute, but cramped), 8x8x12 (less cramped; dead simple), 8x12x12 (enough room for a cover and might accomodate the mic preamp), or 12x12x12 (room to stash some mics as well).

Or, for that matter, 3U rackmount. I expect that each variant will be no more than a weekend's work, so I may try several. And probably go with 8x8x12 for now, since my present breadboard is 8x12.

Re: Yup!

[johno.livejournal.com]

What do you plan for keyboard & screen?

Re: Yup!

[mdlbear]

Interesting question, and one to which I don't really have an answer yet. In the short term, I can borrow something from work.

Longer-term, there are four plausible answers:

* get an LCD monitor and a small keyboard.
* use the ancient IBM tablet computer I have lying around, as an xterm
* use a PDA as a miniature front panel display
* use a MIDI control surface and maybe some custom knobs and switches, on the grounds that, darnit, it's a piece of audio gear, not a computer.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Have you worked with Planet CCRMA before? I'm looking at doing something similar...

[mdlbear]

Not sure what you mean by "worked with"; I've installed their complete package on two machines so far (my main workstation and the Mini-ITX), and a partial install on another, with no problems. ALSA, lapt-get, ow-latency kernel; absolutely seamless. Takes an hour or two depending mainly on your connection speed.

There's no automation in their install: first you install apt-get for RPM and download their apt.conf and sources.list files. Then you install and configure the kernel and ALSA. Then you do "apt-get dist-upgrade" to get your entire system up to date. Then you install their music and audio packages, plus whatever other stuff they throw into their repository (open office 1.0.1 showed up recently, for example).

If you're the type who likes a GUI, they also have synaptic, which is a GUI front-end for apt-get.

If you favor Debian, look at http://www.demudi.org

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Hm. Is there a way to download the update directory and update from disk? I'm in the unfortunate situation of having my access to significant bandwidth in a different place than my computers (except for my laptop).

As far as favouring Debian or Red Hat, in recent years I've been a SuSE user... so I guess either one is a switch for me :) (Last time I was running RH was early in the 5.x releases, as I recall, and before that was Slackware.)

I'll have to play with these (in my copious free time, of course.)

[mdlbear]

Check out the Planet CCRMA link -- there's a whole section on downloading the lot and burning a CD. Or you could just leave the RPMs in a directory somewhere.

The cool thing about apt-get is that you can set up a list of sources, and it takes the most recent version from all of them. So you can install from a CD and then update just what changed since the CD was burned.