I picked up a pentium III on hard rubbish day and brought it home and it's now happily running Mandrake off a 4Gb hard drive with about 256Mb RAM.

My intention is obviously to having it runnning as a Carputer at the end of it but i wanted to gather as much info from people who have used linux with their Carputers.

Anyone here done it? Know any links to others who have? Anything at all would be good

Cheers

while its not Linux based, read my thread: http://www.mobileelectronics.com.au/forums...showtopic=87818

might help you with the hardware side of things.

-Rice

Linux is easier once you get the hang of it. I don't use it in the car, but have several 'appliances' running Debian or uNSLUng and a couple of servers running Fedora/Red Hat.

^^^ Yep, hard out nerd.
Try modifying an XBOX classic to suit linux, minor work needed (google it) and works like a charm.

Nah, not interesting in the Xbox thing. No ideas to help a quick boot then??

look up LFS - linux from scratch

some mighty quick boot times there

You can suspend to Ram-to-disk just like you can on windows

Windows can run on a small system too - you don't need the bloated modern versions of windows for a carpc. Or look at something like BartPE which lets you cut down a windows install

THe problem that you'll probably have with Linux is hardware compatibility. A lot of devices aren't support well if at all - and for a car pc you'll probably be wanting some GPS, TV, mobile internet, digital radio etc devices.

well, the thing about linux is, that everything is supported, thats why it is commonly used in very specialised applications, the way we consider 'supported' is, we can go to a website, download a driver and it's all good, linux supports everything, but not mainstream, you may have to write your own, or modify existing drivers to suit the hardware your using.

Only problem is that it requires some quite detailed know-how to do it, but if your really keen, you could try asking around on forums dedicated to your particular linux destribution. im sure for somone who is skilled in it, they could probably know together a very effective front-end, plus the fact that it's pretty much all free and open source, they tend to write very effective programs (but i'm sure a small donation his way for writing you a program wouldn't go astray).

Just by asking around on places like that, you would be surprised but how willing people are to help.

good luck

im running linux on my ps3
only prob is cant veiw some stuff like youtube etc
just waiting now 4 my mate to get back & mod it again

Thanks to everyone, i will look at all of that ^^ I'd write about my progress but it wont be a fast paced event. Perhaps i'll write a Tech article once i'm done and hopefully inspire others to do the same because it is such a great idea and i will hopefully be running a really streamline system.
But until i find some magic beans i will be asking at linux forums and reading the books to better my programing and the likes.