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Linux OS for car PC

C

CrazyDemon

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 16, 2001
Messages
1,247
Hey everyone,

It seems that time for upgrading has come yet again, and this time it's a Car-PC

I plan to use my old Dual celeron 500mhz pc in a car.
Right now im working on a modified power supply that car run from the 12V availible from the battery.

What I am a little concerned about are the boot times and shutdown issues with this project.

What would be ideal is an OS which has a quick boot time, but more importantly, does not freak out when power is cut off without shutting down. It must also be able to operate efficiently at fairly low resolutions from the 7" TFT screen

I suppose I could design a circuit which would force the system to shut down triggered by the ignition switch, but that may present some problems with power staying on for some reason or other due to a failed shut down.

If you have any suggestions, dont hesitate to reply.
 
Use a live CD- it will be impervious to impacts and bad shutdowns because the filesystem exists in ram and on a CD, and if you need storage space for files, use a USB pen. Knoppix or a custom verision of it would probably work well.
 
All I know is that my car PC is running windows 2000. I stripped down the services a bit to get it to boot up faster (still takes a bit of time, but not much). Shutting down is a piece of cake, I just push the power button once and Windows automatically shuts down. It takes about 1 second from the time I push the button to the time the hard drive starts spinning down.
 
jagec, could you please pm me reply on the exact changes you've made to it?

I can never get windows to shutdown that fast, and I am also interested in the service changes you've made.

As for the Hard drive, i plan to mount it verticly so that even If I do hit a bump, the heads move parallel to the plates rather then smashing into them. The HD assembly will also be suspended on elastc springs to compensate for as many vibrations as possible.
 
First off, I'd probably ditch the 2nd CPU.


As for having it be resiliant to shutdowns, have all your file-systems mounted read-only & disable logging. Read-only FSes don't get corrupted by sudden shutdowns.
 
Originally posted by CrazyDemon
jagec, could you please pm me reply on the exact changes you've made to it?

I can never get windows to shutdown that fast, and I am also interested in the service changes you've made.

As for the Hard drive, i plan to mount it verticly so that even If I do hit a bump, the heads move parallel to the plates rather then smashing into them. The HD assembly will also be suspended on elastc springs to compensate for as many vibrations as possible.
Click to expand...
OK, I timed it just to be sure, and it takes 1 minute 30 seconds to boot up (from when you push the button to when Winamp starts playing) and 1.66 seconds to shut down.

Changes: Made sure no programs were starting up with Windows except Winamp, set it to automatically log on, and set my services as follows:
Automatic:
Logical Disk Manager
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Removable Storage
Plug and Play
Protected Storage
Windows Management Instrumentation Driver Extensions
Workstation
System Event Notification
Windows Management Instrumentation
COM+ Event System

Disabled:
Messenger
Telnet
Server
Task Scheduler
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Routing and Remote Access
Remote Registry Service

everything else is Manual.
I used tweakui to turn off some eye candy, too.

This setup is sufficient to play music, movies, surf the web, use Office, and pretty much everything else that "normal" users would want. Doesn't do much in the way of networking, though.
 
1:30 to music? That's quite a long time. Pretty quick shutdown time though. Mine hits music at about 23 seconds, but I'm just using dos. With dos I can also just cut the power. With linux, you can mount the partitions as read-only as someone mentioned so that you don't have a problem if you just cut the power. I think linux can be made to boot pretty quickly. I know there are patches that allow startup stuff to run parallelly, speeding up boot. There are shutdown controllers which will trigger a shutdown when you turn off the car and then cut power after a certain length of time. There is a lot of talk about these in the power supply forum over at mp3car.com.
 
Originally posted by jpmkm
1:30 to music? That's quite a long time. Pretty quick shutdown time though. Mine hits music at about 23 seconds, but I'm just using dos.
Click to expand...
hey, it's win2k, and it's not heavily stripped down. If you plug it into a monitor, it's a fully functional computer, and I plan to use it for car movies as well (for the passengers, obviously). It's almost tempting to put on winxp, but a C3 800MHz + 256MB RAM may be "enough" for XP, but would be too slow for my liking.
 
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