On this page I will list some of the other programs I set up on the eBox and configuration changes I made to enable various functionality (other than described on the movies, music, remote control and video capture pages).
I have documented some of what I did to install Slackware Linux 8.1 on the eBox. If Slackware what you want to use, here it is (older Slackware 8.0 instructions are here).
A bunch of shell scripts, config files and other bits from the eBox can be found here, in case anyone might find them useful.
eboxy is my own software for handling the eBox's GUI menus.
The XOSD plugin for XMMS is actually part of a general library which can display text on top of other windows. As it is just an "unmanaged" shaped window, it can appear on top of anything, even xv video windows. If you look at the source code for the simple test application it's really easy to build into your applications, too.
lm_sensors is a set of kernel drivers mainly for reading build-in system monitoring values (temperature, fan speed etc). Most motherboard chips should now be supported, so check it out if you want this functionality. Instructions are in the QUICKSTART file in the tar archive, and are easy to follow. Just make sure you compile your kernel with the i2c functions enabed as modules, and leave the kernel source installed.
Note: As an alternative to mmounter, the CDDE project offers a slightly more modern and capable application that does autoplaying of CDs and DVDs. At the moment I am not using this or mmounter myself because I haven't figured out how to make it play nicely with eboxy (ie, not interrupt what you're currently doing in the menu).
The Magic(!) Mounter or mmounter is a little package I found on SourceForge (after no small amount of searching the web I might add)
that will automatically mount a CD when it is inserted in the drive. What it actually does is to poll the drive to see if there's a disc in there, and if there is and it's not
already mounted, it will mount it. This is similar to the way KDE and Gnome do it, but you don't actually need to be running either of these desktop platforms at all, which is exactly
what I wanted. When I downloaded it, mmounter hadn't been updated since 2000 and refused to compile. With a small amount of tweaking I compiled it and got it going. It behaves a bit strangely,
insisting on making and deleting its own mount points (which I conceded to in the end, so I actually have a temporary /mnt/cdrom), but with minor changes to the source and the
config files it does exactly what I want. When I insert a CD, it runs a script that mounts the drive and then checks to see if it's a DVD or something else it can play - if it is,
then the appropriate action is performed. Most of the logic is in shell scripts, but without mmounter I don't think I could have done it - from what I could see, autofs/automount
are designed to mount the CD when you access it, not when it's available (ie. inserted).
Update: I have now released my patched-up version of mmounter in the files area, along with the config file and shell scripts I use with it. It's still not
perfect, but about the only annoyance other than the temporary mount point is the "VFS: disk change detected" messages that get flooded into the kernel ring buffer (the
"boot messages" displayed by the dmesg command), which is caused by the drive polling, but I don't think there's a way around this. I will be doing some more work
on this later.