I have been looking to do this for quite a while. Anyone with more interest in this project please contact me as I have not been able to find much information on it. However, I have accumulated a PIC programmer, a working knowledge of PIC assembly, some circuit design / soldering skills, and a will to complete the project.
I don't know what distro you're using, but since there's a lot of debain-related info out there, there's also fezbox, a tool that lets you use the "kickstart" option of redhat.
Essentially, once you've used fezbox to create a kickstart install script, all you have to do is put the cd and a floppy disk with the config files in the pc, reboot it, and it just gets done. Again, I don't know if a PC will boot with no video/keyboard/etc, but there might be some way to disable this in the BIOS. worth a try...
btw, cheap linux cdz from cheapbytes.com, linuxmall.com, in case ur like me and don't have broadband:-(
Here's a bit of what I've been grappling with lately:
I recently purchased a sharp minidisc player. What I have learned thus far hasn't been impressive, but it's wirth mentioning.
Minidiscs are like cd's in that they store data digitially, except that it's compressed using an algorithm called ATRAC. My player uses atrac3.5. Anyway, the compression is done in realtime by a processor inside of the player/recorder. Most agree that ATRAC is an exceptionally clear algortihm, and presonally, I can't tell the difference between the original cdda and the encoded version.
So that gets us onto the question of why. Why would one want an MP3 player that uses minidiscs?
1. More data - MDs hold substantially more than a compactflash card or whatever MP3 players use 2. The option of realtime recording (I'm sitting in my piss-boring french class copying tunes off the girl who sits behind me's discman)
In doing this, several tradeoffs will be made: 1. MP3 players, in their current form, are absolutely skip-proof, being that they are completely solid state and such. Abandoning solid-state media will always open the door to skippage.
2. Higher power consumption - it's undeniable that making something spin and reading it with an optical pickup will consume more power than simply reading/decoding data off of a flash card.
3. Size - all the MP3 players I've seen are VERY small.
So then, I step back, and I look. In my opinion, it would definitely be worth it. All this would take is to make a MD player with an embedded mp3 decoder. It would probably be wise to keep an atrac en/decoder around too, for realtime recording. The MD player would have to be able to read some sort of filesystem, but MP3 players are already doing that, so really, ho hard can it be?
The more I think about this, the more I think of some Sony gadget I saw that had the words mp3 and minidisc in the same title, maybe it's already been done. Might be a bit pricey, but definitely worth it...
I have tried to do this. When I did it, it was a horrendous mess. Windows doesn't work like you'd think it would. Each OS installs the same code into the MBR. Be it Win95, 98, or NT. (I'm not sure about 3.1 but it would make sense...)
So anyway what this generic MS MBR does is looks for the "active" partition. This can be set from within dos's FDISK or NT's Disk Administrator. So, what I'm saying is that you'd need, somehow, to regulate the flag for the active partition to do this. Maybe I'm wrong, just trying to help.
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I have been looking to do this for quite a while. Anyone with more interest in this project please contact me as I have not been able to find much information on it. However, I have accumulated a PIC programmer, a working knowledge of PIC assembly, some circuit design / soldering skills, and a will to complete the project.
I don't know what distro you're using, but since there's a lot of debain-related info out there, there's also fezbox, a tool that lets you use the "kickstart" option of redhat.
:-(
Essentially, once you've used fezbox to create a kickstart install script, all you have to do is put the cd and a floppy disk with the config files in the pc, reboot it, and it just gets done. Again, I don't know if a PC will boot with no video/keyboard/etc, but there might be some way to disable this in the BIOS. worth a try...
btw, cheap linux cdz from cheapbytes.com, linuxmall.com, in case ur like me and don't have broadband
Here's a bit of what I've been grappling with lately:
I recently purchased a sharp minidisc player. What I have learned thus far hasn't been impressive, but it's wirth mentioning.
Minidiscs are like cd's in that they store data digitially, except that it's compressed using an algorithm called ATRAC. My player uses atrac3.5. Anyway, the compression is done in realtime by a processor inside of the player/recorder. Most agree that ATRAC is an exceptionally clear algortihm, and presonally, I can't tell the difference between the original cdda and the encoded version.
So that gets us onto the question of why. Why would one want an MP3 player that uses minidiscs?
1. More data - MDs hold substantially more than a compactflash card or whatever MP3 players use
2. The option of realtime recording (I'm sitting in my piss-boring french class copying tunes off the girl who sits behind me's discman)
In doing this, several tradeoffs will be made:
1. MP3 players, in their current form, are absolutely skip-proof, being that they are completely solid state and such. Abandoning solid-state media will always open the door to skippage.
2. Higher power consumption - it's undeniable that making something spin and reading it with an optical pickup will consume more power than simply reading/decoding data off of a flash card.
3. Size - all the MP3 players I've seen are VERY small.
So then, I step back, and I look. In my opinion, it would definitely be worth it. All this would take is to make a MD player with an embedded mp3 decoder. It would probably be wise to keep an atrac en/decoder around too, for realtime recording. The MD player would have to be able to read some sort of filesystem, but MP3 players are already doing that, so really, ho hard can it be?
The more I think about this, the more I think of some Sony gadget I saw that had the words mp3 and minidisc in the same title, maybe it's already been done. Might be a bit pricey, but definitely worth it...
I have tried to do this. When I did it, it was a horrendous mess. Windows doesn't work like you'd think it would. Each OS installs the same code into the MBR. Be it Win95, 98, or NT. (I'm not sure about 3.1 but it would make sense...)
So anyway what this generic MS MBR does is looks for the "active" partition. This can be set from within dos's FDISK or NT's Disk Administrator. So, what I'm saying is that you'd need, somehow, to regulate the flag for the active partition to do this. Maybe I'm wrong, just trying to help.
Gotta go to school now. Bye