Web Remote Pnuematic Tank (Linux Project)

[DirtyDan]

Hey, I have been working on a project for a few months now to use this cheapy Toshiba laptop my friend gave me for free (hard drive problems, fixed now) for a remote control vehicle. I have to 18VDC drill motors I will be using, ordered some relays and transistors to get this thing rolling, and have a lot of frames in mind (plexi-glass?) along with some experience with pneumatic PVC cannons; which will be my final addition if I get this thing going.

Anyways, I am currently trying to configure the hardware and am having a heck of a time. Tryed Vector Linux 3.0. Slick, fast, and perfect for the laptop I have, but kernel troubles are driving me crazy. After an upgrade to 2.6.10 so I could get Video4Linux, I lost module support altogether. The hard drive is only 4gb so other distro's are a stretch. I'd particularly like one with kernel source onboard, but I am downloading VL4.3 right now too (Kernel 2.6.7). If I get the hardware to work, the rest will be simple. Setup my webpage via Apache, have a Javascript take user input from keyboard and post it to a CGI, and have the CGI send output a nifty Parrelell Port script I borrowed.

Does anyone have any tips for setting up a WebCam (and cam server), wireless card, or in general any addition? Any help is great, I am hoping this will be a great success.

 

[graphic7]

Hey, I have been working on a project for a few months now to use this cheapy Toshiba laptop my friend gave me for free (hard drive problems, fixed now) for a remote control vehicle. I have to 18VDC drill motors I will be using, ordered some relays and transistors to get this thing rolling, and have a lot of frames in mind (plexi-glass?) along with some experience with pneumatic PVC cannons; which will be my final addition if I get this thing going.

Anyways, I am currently trying to configure the hardware and am having a heck of a time. Tryed Vector Linux 3.0. Slick, fast, and perfect for the laptop I have, but kernel troubles are driving me crazy. After an upgrade to 2.6.10 so I could get Video4Linux, I lost module support altogether. The hard drive is only 4gb so other distro's are a stretch. I'd particularly like one with kernel source onboard, but I am downloading VL4.3 right now too (Kernel 2.6.7). If I get the hardware to work, the rest will be simple. Setup my webpage via Apache, have a Javascript take user input from keyboard and post it to a CGI, and have the CGI send output a nifty Parrelell Port script I borrowed.

Does anyone have any tips for setting up a WebCam (and cam server), wireless card, or in general any addition? Any help is great, I am hoping this will be a great success.

You can download any version of the Linux kernel source from www.kernel.org. As far as getting the wireless card working, that should be as simple as making sure you have the module or seeing that it's compiled in the kernel. This can be done with a quick kernel recompilation. As far as V4L, I have no expertise, however in the kernel documentation one can find which webcam models are supported by which modules. There's plenty of documentation available in the kernel docs for V4L.

I would suspect that when you upgraded to 2.6.10, the person who compiled it did not include V4L support (assuming you did a binary upgrade). As I said, this can be fixed by simply including the modules or compiling it in the kernel.

 

[DirtyDan]

Yeah, what I meant to say is that I recompiled the new kernel and I got it from the site you just posted . After the compile, I received the error "QM_MODULES: function not implemented" On a modprove, insmod, etc. Some other sites on the web referred me to modules-init-tools, which I attempted to install but it did not resolve my problem so I gave up at that point and moved on.

 

[dduardo]

Are you sure you enabled loadable module support?

 

[DirtyDan]

I think I had "Autoload Module Support" enabled or something along those lines, it was default. But I remember the first time I compiled it all worked fine; then I realized I forgot PCMCIA support, recompiled, and started having module trouble. I can try it again and enable all of the module section..?

 

[dduardo]

When you installed the lastest modules-init-tools did you make clean the kernel source directory before compiling again?

 

[DirtyDan]

Would make mrproper have worked? Or is that too far? and ummm...

After installing modules-init-tools I didnt recompile the kernel. I did what this guide said, maybe that was my problem. http://kerneltrap.org/node/3891 It gave a lot of errors though, first on make with the latest version. I downlodaed m-i-t3.0 instead and then the ./generate script said "Warning: (every module I have on my system) not loaded"

In Vector Linux, the directory structure is odd. There is a /usr/src/linux folder, but it is not the 2.4.24 kernel source, and replacing it with a kernel source causes problems when compiling the kernel. Something about "Missing asm"

 

[dduardo]

yes, mr. clean works just fine. hehe

Oh, so you couldn't install modules-init-tools? Or could you?

 

[DirtyDan]

I did install it... But it took a while to work out the glitches. Its just it didnt fix anything, and I didnt bother to recompile the kernel after that (It was on my way to school this morning...) Now I've gone and started installing VL4.3

Wish me luck!
Thanks for your help

 

[DirtyDan]

That was a miserable failure. I am not sure if it was a computer issue or a CD error but VL4.3 installation left me without a boot loader and didnt actually format my harddrive like it was supposed to; It just tried to overwrite everything. Slackware now?

 

[graphic7]

That was a miserable failure. I am not sure if it was a computer issue or a CD error but VL4.3 installation left me without a boot loader and didnt actually format my harddrive like it was supposed to; It just tried to overwrite everything. Slackware now?

Just pick a distribution and go with it. Linux distributions are all in the same basket, however, I think SuSE and Fedora stand out from the rest. If you're looking for something a bit lighter, try Debian.

 

[dduardo]

Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo!

With Gentoo you install exactly what you need, nothing more and nothing less. You have complete control over the installation, which may or may not be a good thing. Their documention is perhaps the best of all the distros and provides the up to dat packages.

http://www.gentoo.org/

All you need is the minimal cd (50.5 MB) and an internet connection to install. You can also get the universal cd (632.7 MB), but you won't be installing the latest packages avaliable at the moment.

 

[graphic7]

Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo!

With Gentoo you install exactly what you need, nothing more and nothing less. You have complete control over the installation, which may or may not be a good thing. Their documention is perhaps the best of all the distros and provides the up to dat packages.

http://www.gentoo.org/

All you need is the minimal cd (50.5 MB) and an internet connection to install. You can also get the universal cd (632.7 MB), but you won't be installing the latest packages avaliable at the moment.

Fedora also allows you to manage which packages are installed during the installation process, and with 'yum,' it allows post-installation package updates and installs.

With Fedora "complete control" over the package management system is at your discretion. If you need it, fine, if you don't, then that's fine.

Most 3rd party propiertary software nowadays is being shipped in RPMs, how is Gentoo's support for RPMs?

 

[DirtyDan]

I have gentoo on this machine, did a stage 1-3 install (Took a day to compile). This laptop is only 266mhz, 4gb hard drive, 96mb ram. Gentoo minimal would be awesome, but what are the chances that it will setup my wireless PCMCIA network card? Without that it would be a no-go. SuSe, Fedora? Hmmm... I've had a lot of luck with slackware, even had it on this comp before. Finals are this weekend but i'll try a few things. Which distro, out of Fedora, SuSe, Gentoo, Debian, etc am I most likely going to be able to get wireless support on boot, because that is looking more critical.

 

[graphic7]

I have gentoo on this machine, did a stage 1-3 install (Took a day to compile). This laptop is only 266mhz, 4gb hard drive, 96mb ram. Gentoo minimal would be awesome, but what are the chances that it will setup my wireless PCMCIA network card? Without that it would be a no-go. SuSe, Fedora? Hmmm... I've had a lot of luck with slackware, even had it on this comp before. Finals are this weekend but i'll try a few things. Which distro, out of Fedora, SuSe, Gentoo, Debian, etc am I most likely going to be able to get wireless support on boot, because that is looking more critical.

I'm relatively sure Fedora and SuSE will detect the wireless card on the spot. I've seen very few pieces of hardware that were not detected by their hardware detection; out of these pieces of hardware, none were ethernet or wireless cards.

 

[dduardo]

Gentoo doesn't need RPMs because it has its own very large repository.

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/

If you really wanted to install an rpm you can emerge rpm, but I haven't come across a situation were I had to.

In terms of the installation process and even post-installation you have very fine-tune control on how each package is compiled with the USE FLAGS. For example, when you install PHP 5.0, Gentoo allows you to pick which libraries get compiled into the binary. If you don't need oracle support, don't install it. This is something unique to Gentoo.

 

[graphic7]

Gentoo doesn't need RPMs because it has its own very large repository.

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/

If you really wanted to install an rpm you can emerge rpm, but I haven't come across a situation were I had to.

In terms of the installation process and even post-installation you have very fine-tune control on how each package is compiled with the USE FLAGS. For example, when you install PHP 5.0, Gentoo allows you to pick which libraries get compiled into the binary. If you don't need oracle support, don't install it. This is something unique to Gentoo.

I've usually had terrible experiences trying to convert an RPM to another package format and it actually install correctly. I'm unaware of how 'Emerge,' does the conversion, though.

There's still a lot of important software that only comes with packages for RPM-based distributions.

As for the 'USE FLAGS" you were talking about, I'll cheat and say that FreeBSD does that (and has done it since who-knows-when), also. If you'd prefer to keep it in the scope of Linux distributions, I'll agree that is unique to Gentoo.

 

[DirtyDan]

I hate to try this but I am getting Suse 9.2, all 5 cd's.

 

[graphic7]

I hate to try this but I am getting Suse 9.2, all 5 cd's.

If you ever have to do an installation when you don't have an Internet connection, you'll be capable of doing it at least.

 

[dduardo]

emerge doesn't even touch RPMs, it more like slackware's installpkg which deals only with .tgz files.

Can you name some software that only comes in RPM? Even big packages like modelsim and oracle come in .tgz format.

 

[graphic7]

emerge doesn't even touch RPMs, it more like slackware's installpkg which deals only with .tgz files.

Can you name some software that only comes in RPM? Even big packages like modelsim and oracle come in .tgz format.

Intel compilers, Applix, Adabas, StarOffice, Codewarrior

The industry standard is pretty much RPMs.

.tgz's lack a lot of features that RPMs have. PGP-verification, triggers, post-installation tasks, etc. You can see why it's the standard.

Correction: .tgz's do offer post-installation tasks, as well as, pre-installation tasks.

 

[DirtyDan]

By the way, while we are on the topic of keeping this small with dependancies, what would a webcam server require? Would it absolutely need X, glib, gtk+, and all of those goodies? Or could I get away with nothing but a simplified kernel, PCMCIA support, USB support, drivers and gcc (I know I am missing a lot but I am not thinking clearly. Mark Twain paper due tommorow...) That would be an interesting install


My problem with a 5cd installation is my 4gb harddrive

 

[dduardo]

Alot more companies are now using .bin files since they don't have to manatain twenty different rpm versions. StarOffice is distributed using a .bin. Nvidia also uses .bin.