A while back I purchased a FitPC and wrote briefly about my intention to take it with me on a moto ride from NYC to SF. While I'm still not certain I'll take it due to increasing concerns about having sufficient power I have been working with it here and there.
I should have written this stuff sooner while it was still fresh in the mind but here goes anyway.
Installing Ubuntu 8.10 on a FitPC
I was simply unable to make a bootable USB drive for the FitPC no matter what I tried. The FitPC wiki does cover the topic and I'm no stranger to installing foreign OS's on unsuspecting hardware but the problem appeared to be that the FitPC would not boot from the USB no mater the BIOS tweak etc etc etc -- I ended up taking the easier path of temporarily installing the HDD into an available laptop I had laying around and installing the OS to HDD then placing the HDD back into the FitPC. It's worth noting that while I could easily make a bootable USB drive for my other machines I could not make that boot USB work for the FitPC, go figure.
The hiccup you may run into if you plan on running the FitPC as a headless machine (hence opting for Ubuntu Server distribution) is that the server based Ubuntu distribution enables bigmem in the kernel which will not work with the FitPC. You MUST install the generic kernel and not the server kernel else when once you reboot your fresh install you'll be met with an unhelpful kernel message about wrong CPU type or wrong memory type or similar (I wish I still had the details to write about it in full). Either way just remember to install the generic kernel.
Contact me if you want a dd image copy of the fresh 8.10 install it's a ~250mb download. This way you can just do a dd to image my fresh image to your drive.
Of late I've developed various useful tools for the FitPC given my intended application, namely:-
- FitPC phone home -- a utility to check for an available network connection and create an ssh tunnel to a known host. I've got to believe every k-rad hax0r has written one of these in their time and mine is yet another, for a legitimate purpose!
- FitPC take photo -- a utility to check for available image capture devices and take a snapshot image once every X seconds.
- FitPC data sync -- a utility to rsync data to a remote machine based on a priority schedule because in my usage scenario where I'm riding across the country I don't know how long a network connection will remain available so based on a priority schedule data is sent back 'home'.
More FitPC stuff later...
After having an unrelated
After having an unrelated incident where I drained my battery I decided against taking the FitPC which now I'm into the journey I regret since I now realise it would have been just fine. The far and away bigger problem with the way I wanted to use the FitPC was not the FitPC but the availability of a good camera that's up to the task. Mounting a camera to the front of a motrobike involves a LOT of vibration and I discovered that unless the camera has a very fast shutter (400F) the shots are blurred. In the end I "discovered" the Nikon Coolpix S560 (cheap point a shoot camera) has a feature whereby you can set it up to take a shot once every 30 seconds which was a little longer interval than I really wanted but since it's such a simple compact unit I went with it. The Coolpix range also has an external power attachment available that slots in place of the battery thus it is super simple to rig up to draw power from the bike.
I still love the FitPC though!
How's the PC holding up on
How's the PC holding up on the road?
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