David Powell - 2004-06-22

I have a new project which I think ETC would be perfect for.  I found a deal on some old '486 laptop computers a while back and bought a dozen or so of them, with the intention of ripping out their innards and making some digital picture frames for myself and for gifts.  A friend suggested ETC would be a good fit for this project, and the more I think about it the more I agree.

My requirements are simple - these picture frames must:
1. have zero moving parts,
2. have one small wire going to a wall-wart type power supply,
3. randomly select and display a picture from a shared network drive on a periodic basis, and
4. have no hardwired network connection.

Requirement #1 is solved - I have loaded the ETC binary on a compact flash card, and successfully had it boot via a PCMCIA slot. Requirements #2 and #3 are pretty much no-brainer.  It's requirement #4 that I'm having a little trouble with.  Specifically, I need to recompile the ETC code in order to work in the wireless driver (an ATMEL chipset) and the PCMCIA drivers.  I downloaded the source code from the ETC site, overlaid it with the code in the src directory from the binary distribution (I guess that's the right thing to do), but I can't seem to get it to compile.  I followed the instructions exactly, but always get compile errors.  When I fix one, several more appear on the next attempt.

Rather than trying to work through all of these errors, I think what's wrong here is more fundamental.  Can you please tell me what environment you compile this under?  I'm using Knoppix 3.3 (a Debian offshoot, I believe).  I'm a Java programmer,  haven't done C in years, and really not all that familiar with Linux development, although I have messed with Linux quite a bit as a web platform.  I guess not all compilers are the same (even though they should be), and perhaps I have some libraries that are at the wrong level or in the wrong location.  I know, for example, that the first error was complaining about missing a header file (autoconf.h, I believe), and after finding it and copying it to the include directory I got past that error.  The next one said something about an unmatched quote in string.h, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.

Anything you can do to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

David