Soundstation project


I love listening to music and I have quite a few CDs.
Some time ago (almost two years back now) I thought that it would be very nice to have a kind of PC that memorizes all my music and displays a list where I could select the songs that I would like to listen to - this way I wouldn't need to search each time for the CDs that contain the songs I want to listen to and I would be able to make playlists. I tried to search the net for such a machine, which in the end is some kind of jukebox, but unluckily I didn't find much.
Philips created such a thing, but unluckily I didn't like very much how it looked like, the screen was very small, the capacity was quite limited and it isn't cheap. I found as well some other offers, but they looked like to be even more expensive. After a short period of disappointment I thought that I could try to build such a machine using a PC and started therefore thinking about the requirements and how to implement them. I started about 6 months ago, and I'm still not done with it, so this article will be for a while under construction.

This is quite a long story, so I divided it into the following chapters:



Here the resolutions for some of the problems I had:

  • After issuing the command shutdown -h now, the system was going down but without turning off the power - the last message displayed was System halted.
    Add the option acpi=force to the boot line of your boot manager (e.g. grub.conf). This may, on the other side, lead to undesired behaviour of some components reported by /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature, like a CPU temperature of -266 C... .
  • After issuing the commands echo shutdown > /sys/power/disk; echo disk > /sys/power/state to suspend the PC using swsusp, the screen becomes black with only a cursor blinking and it doesn't suspend nor shutdowns.
    Make sure that in the kernel, under Power management options (ACPI, APM) => ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support, the options look like this, especially the Sleep States has to be inactive: 
    [*] ACPI Support
[ ]   Sleep States
<*>   AC Adapter
<*>   Battery
<*>   Button
<*>   Video
< >   Generic Hotkey (EXPERIMENTAL)
<*>   Fan
< >   Dock
<*>   Processor
<*>     Thermal Zone
< >   ASUS/Medion Laptop Extras
< >   IBM ThinkPad Laptop Extras
< >   Toshiba Laptop Extras
(0)   Disable ACPI for systems before Jan 1st this year
[*]   Debug Statements
< >   ACPI0004,PNP0A05 and PNP0A06 Container Driver (EXPERIMENTAL)
< >   Smart Battery System (EXPERIMENTAL)
    If, after setting the options as shown above, the system complains about lirc during suspend with a message similar to echo: write error: Device or resource busy and you see in your /var/log/messages something like... 
    Jun 14 14:26:08 VIA Stopping tasks: =======================
Jun 14 14:26:08 VIA stopping tasks timed out after 20 seconds (1 tasks remaining):
Jun 14 14:26:08 VIA lirc_dev
Jun 14 14:26:08 VIA Restarting tasks...<6> Strange, lirc_dev not stopped
    ... try to manually shutdown the lirc devices before suspending the system. Do this with: 
    /etc/init.d/lircd stop
modprobe -r lirc_i2c
modprobe -r lirc_dev