This project takes photos from a digital camera and gathers them into a gallery for posting on a website. It's very simple right now: it converts photos of any size to 640x480 and a thumbnail that's 128x96 by default. There'a a GUI and a command line interface, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

project page

This site will become managed with CamelSite as soon as I get around to making it work. Originally, all I wanted to do was to make a blog program but after working some more on the site, it seems like the whole site can be structured like a blog site and managed the same way. I could have used some other availible CMS but I wanted to learn PHP and brush up on my database programming.

I wanted a central location to keep files so I can access them from any computer in the house. The server also needs to be as quiet as possible since the machine will be powered on all the time. Inside there's a Via mini-ITX with an 533MHz Eden, 160MB (128MB + 32MB) of PC100 SDRAM and a 100W snap in power supply from ituner.com. The hard drive is a Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM drive. At 7200RPM it does get noisy, especially when spinning up. The drive is usually powered down so it's not that much of a problem.

The machine boots Linux off of a 64MB USB thumb drive. It is a USB 1.1 interface so the machine takes about 1 minute to finish booting. The USB drive has a FAT partition and an ext2 partition. The FAT partition is for syslinux, which is an easy-to-use bootloader by Peter Anvin, who was once a software guy at Transmeta. It loads a kernel (2.4.something) and a small root disk image into ramdisk to set a few things up and then it loads the real root image into another ramdisk followed by the usr disk. By loading the OS into ramdisk, I can keep the system files separate from the data, which will all be on the hard drive. I got a lot of information for setting up a ramdisk here and in the kernel documentation under Documentation/ramdisk.txt .

The first laptop I tried to install linux on is a 486 Compaq laptop that I bought for $25 at Weird Stuff. I had to fix it up (cosmetically) and buy some other accessories for it but it ended up working OK. I installed Slackware 7 on it through a laplink cable connected to my desktop running PLIP. The CD-ROM was mounted on the desktop and exported as an nfs export. The whole process took a whopping 26 hours of installing. It took a few more hours to set up the install. I may put up more details to this later, but I don't really do anything with that machine anymore.

The main laptop I use now is an HP Pavillion zu1175 (similar to an OmniBook 500). It's running Slackware 9.0 with a bunch of updates to it. This one was complicated in its own way because I wanted to dual-boot with the default WindowsXP loaded on there. But it didn't come with the original Windows disks, just a set of restore CDs that overwrites the partitions. The nice thing about the Slackware install is that it starts the user off in a basic shell. From there, I could run fdisk to repartition the drive to allow an NTFS partition, two Linux partitions, one linux swap partition and a "hibernation" partition. Then the HP system restore utility can be set to install on the NTFS partition and keep the rest of the partitions intact. Actually installing Linux wasn't much trouble. I'm going to update to Slackware 10 soon, so I'll update again when that goes down.

I bought an ECS EZ-Tablet EZ-30 TabletPC on Ebay earlier this year and I've been trying to install Linux on that too. So far, I tried compiling a kernel to boot from it but I think the IDE controller drivers weren't working. I ran Knoppix on it also. I could get it to boot to KDE but then the trackpad stopped working and I could only use the tablet pen, which was miscallibrated. Anyway, work on this machine is ongoing.

This is my newest laptop. I had Linux installed the day after I got it, but it wasn't in a very usable form until last week. The first problem was to get ACPI working so the CPU wouldn't burn up. Then the pointer wouldn't work, and then some other random crap was wrong. But now it's pretty much mostly working.

Slackware 10.0 on a Sharp MP30

Here are my notes on installing my MythTV system. It's a basic install, but I had to do some tweaks that were specific to the hardware I'm using.