Blah blah!? - IT-Soundstation project

Editing Mra.Soundstation

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(:title IT-Soundstation project:)
!!!%red%{+Soundstation project+}
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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:
*[[Soundstation1 | Chapter 1 - Theory & hardware]]
*[[Soundstation2 | Chapter 2 - Initial setup]]
*[[Soundstation3 | Chapter 3 - Jukebox music setup]]
*[[Soundstation4 | Chapter 4 - CPU throttling & Co.]]
*[[Soundstation5 | Chapter 5 - Watch movies]]

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%red%Here the resolutions for some of the problems I had:
*%purple%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''.
-->%green%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... .
*%purple%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.%%
-->%green%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)@]
-->%green%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@]
-->%green%... 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@]