Have you seen all of those cool cats with their mp3 enabled cars? Don't want to spend a fortune to get a fancy, expensive car mp3 player? Have an old mac sitting arround itching to be put to use? Now there's an easy way to solve both problems!

I found an old PowerBook G3 Lombard sitting around. I set it up with Debian GNU/Linux, a CrystalFontz LCD screen, and CAJUN as an mp3 jukebox. I even have an ATI REMOTE WONDER to use to control it.

(Also available on My personal site, as are all of my other cool mods)

First, you're going to need a computer to use. I chose a PowerBook G3 233mhz (Wallstreet), solely because I had it sitting in a closet, and it has no working keyboard, so it isn't very viable to use it as a real laptop. Really any PowerPC machine should do it (68k's are REALLY bad at decoding MP3), but obviously you're going to want something reasonably fast, but also something that you can easily stow in your car somewhere. Remember that you're also going to have to power this thing. I have a Kensington Auto/AC/Air adapter which I used. You could also use an AC/DC inverter, but make sure that it is powerful enough to power your computer. Also remember that if you get something too powerful, you may have problems cooling it. You'll probably also want a WiFi card so you can manage your music wirelessly.

OK, now that we have our computer, what do we do? It's time to get a screen! CrystalFontz has a great line of screens. They even have a product line that has on-board USB->Serial adapters which provide power too! (Otherwise you need to find a way to get about five volts to the screen).

Now it's software time! First, grab a copy of the latest Debian installer for PPC and burn it to a CD-RW. Install it, and disregard bothering about any extra kernel modules, you're going to be installing a custom kernel anyway. Don't bother installing XFree or any window managers, since you won't be using them, and they will just take up system resources. Once you've finished installing Debian GNU/Linux, (I trust that you can figure this out without me going into full detail, you can always reference the install manual or googling for your specific system and the word Debian, usually you'll come up with a few people who have already installed Debian GNU/Linux on a system like yours), it's time to get BenH's kernel. You have two options here. You can either get my prebuilt kernel that I use, or compile it yourself.

Using the kernel that I have built: I have posted my kernel, all set to go preconfigured for the CrystalFontz USB screens. You can download it from here. Then just run

 
dpkg --install pbg3kernel-image-2.4.25-ben_powerpc.deb

Dpkg should help you take care of it all for you, just prompting for answers to a few simple questions.

Compiling the kernel yourself: Ben has some basic information on his site, or you can see the Debian install manual. Again, google can be your friend if you run into trouble. Make sure that you have the correct modules enabled, but do not go overboard, since it will increase boot time. If you're using a CrystalFontz USB serial LCD, you're going to need to install the FTDI_SIO drivers under the usb->serial adapters part of the configuration. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, the current BenH kernel's FTDI_SIO drivers are not configured correctly to work with the implementation on the CrystalFontz displays. Wayne Wylupski has a fix. If you're using a different adapter, you'll have to install that module, of course.

Got your new kernel installed? Great! Now it's time to move on to the software which will drive the LCD. This is actually quite straight-forward to install, just open up a root shell, and run apt-get install lcdproc. Tada! Check the LCDProc configuration file to make sure that it is to your liking. If you're using a USB->Serial adapter, the serial port should probably be TTYUSB0 or something similar. If you're not sure, the kernel should display a message on the console telling you where the adapter is configured to bind to, ie, /dev/TTYUSB0 or something similar.

Now that we have our LCD screen set up, it's time to set up our music jukebox. First, you're going to need to download and install mPlayer. You can get the .deb files here and then install them with dpkg (or just add them as sources to apt, then do apt-get install mplayer). Now you should be able to play MP3's with mplayer! You should probably take this time to transfer your mp3 collection to your new machine. I put all of mine in /usr/share/mp3/. Make sure to follow a standard convention, ie, ARTIST/ALBUM/SONG (which iTunes will do for you anyway). CAJUN requires SOME sort of standardized naming convention. Though you can break it, it is best to try to stick to one. Make sure that mplayer works now by trying to play one of your new MP3's. We'll also need to install Apache and MySQL. You should install these from apt-get. I chose to use the CAJUN Car Audio Jukebox. Download and install it. It's a pretty messy install, but the documentation should be able to get you through it. Make sure that you have installed the ogg libs, otherwise you're going to run into trouble later on down the road. Do NOT set up CAJUN to start at boot time. When working with mplayer, CAJUN MUST be allocated a TTY. We'll take a look at that later. Once CAJUN is installed, import your music. For now we'll use a keyboard to control CAJUN, so add a PS/2 keyboard device and its mappings, then set up a key layout. Also set up a FilePlayer, and an LCDProc dvice. With CAJUN running, open a tty and type

 
/usr/share/cajun/bin/device _devId XXX basedir /usr/share/cajun dbname cajun

Where 'XXX' is the device id listed in the Device Settings menu. Now you should be able to control CAJUN from your keyboard.

I use an ATI REMOTE WONDER to control my CAJUN. To use it you have to rebuild LCDProc, then set CAJUN to use LCDProc as an input device too. CAJUN's LIRC support is pretty bad, so I wouldn't recommend using it. I'll post a binary of my version of LCDProc in the upcoming days. It may be easier to use a device directly supported by CAJUN, such as the IRMan.

Time to set CAJUN to start at bootup. This is a cheap, quick patch, but it works. Follow LinuxGazzette's auto login instructions and have your machine automatically log in as a user. Then go to that user's home directory, and put in a .bashrc, and in it put

 
 /path/to/cajun/bin/cajun

Now whenever that user logs in, CAJUN will be started, and that user should log in on bootup!

How to install it in your car is really up to you ;). I did a *very* rough install in my Volvo S40, as you can tell in the pictures bellow. You could probably come up with something *a lot* better looking if you put more time into it.

----End----- (June 25, 2004)

The photo gallery!

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