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Mra: IT-Soundstation project

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:

• Chapter 1 - Theory & hardware
• Chapter 2 - Initial setup
• Chapter 3 - Jukebox music setup
• Chapter 4 - CPU throttling & Co.
• Chapter 5 - Watch movies

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