Next question is how do I wait for a process to stop before contuining a script? On startup, I want cenrtain things to happen while the startup sound is playing, like the setup of the ramdrive. I grabbed pidof, but for some reason my pidof /bin/pcmplay | wait just keeps on going, and the player hates to start when the pcmplay program is still going. (Almost had to reupgrade the unit to get out of a bad loop).
You shouldn't need to know the PID; `wait' alone will wait for all outstanding background processes (&) started with the shell to finish.
(If you need to wait for a specific process, grab the PID from $! after spawing it into the background, and give this later as an argument to `wait'.)
I still want to find out how the player deals with disk writes. Maybe with a push, we can get a developer partition allocated to us that survives the upgrade process. That way we can have similar "scratch" space that the player uses for active playlists. The empeg is definitly an open platform that needs to be exploited more, as I really want my empeg to be an in car computer that I can tweak. The AutoPC is cool in it's functionality, but I don't see a WinCE SDK being freely available anytime soon. The empeg only requires a terminal program, and has the empeg developers available for questions.
We do have such a partition already: /dev/hda2 is an (unformatted) 16MB scratch partition protected from being clobbered by upgrades.
I share your enthusiasm for turning the empeg into a development platform, and already have several thoughts about this. I'm hoping this list will give us the momentum and the means to support each other we need to do this successfully. I have more to say on this topic, but I'll save it until I think we've gathered enough audience...
Cheers, -rob