[ale] Zapmedia Zapstation

[aaron]

I believe Michael Hirsch still lurks on the list; I've CC'd this
to the last known good address I had for him as well.

Like James Kinney, he worked on code for the product. I know
he was actively trying to get the code released as full OSS as
recently as 2 years ago. He may be able to offer some advice
if this hits his radar.

peace
aaron

On Friday 24 August 2007 20:00, Brian Pitts wrote:
> James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Dead and gone with the dot com busts. If you hang a CD off the internal
> > IDE connector you should be able to boot and load an OS (Linux only -
> > please :)
> 
> It has two ide channels, one with a black connector and one with a blue 
> connector. When I got it, the hard drive was connected to the blue 
> connector and the dvd drive was connected to the black connector. I 
> placed an Ubuntu 6.06 cd in the dvd drive and got the the three 
> behaviors listed below.
> 
> 1) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
> "please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again. 
> After the second time, the monitor goes black except for a flashing 
> cursor in the lower left. This occurs with if the hard drive is 
> connected to the blue ide channel, i.e.
> 
> a) blue: hdd, black: dvd
> b) blue: hdd, black: n/a
> 
> 2) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
> "please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again, 
> and again, and again, etc. This occurs if nothing is connected to the 
> blue ide channel, i.e.
> 
> c) blue: n/a, black: dvd
> d) blue: n/a, black: hdd
> e) blue: n/a, black: n/a
> 
> 3) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
> "please wait starting up." The lcd then displays "power down your 
> zapstation" and the monitor displays a blinking cursor in the upper 
> left. This occurs if the dvd drive is connected to the blue ide channel, 
> i.e.
> 
> f) blue: dvd, black:hdd
> g) blue: dvd, black n/a
> 
> Behavior #3 doesn't change if the drive is empty or has a different 
> bootable cd. I've also tried booting from usb with no luck.
> 
> I suppose my next step is to pull the drives out and test them in 
> another system. Also, I'm worried that it might not recognize my usb 
> keyboard, making my hit random keys and hope for BIOS setup attempts 
> worthless, but since there are no ps/2 ports...
> 
> > and make a multi-media box yourself with some MP3 jukebox code
> > from freshmeat.
> 
> That's my thought as well. If nothing else, I'm glad to have the case to 
> stick another mini/micro motherboard in.
> 
> > The built-in modem is/was a cheap hunk of crap that even
> > with the custom driver was junk at best (1+MB kernel driver that crashed
> > the system on unload - I did NOT write it just had to code around it).
> 
> To think that only 6 years ago geeks actually had phone lines... I'm 
> going to try to add a wireless card to the one pci slot, but I don't 
> think the motherboard layout will make this easy.
> 
> -Brian
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