Well my friend, I'm feeling mighty let down. The first examination does not come back positive. I took the unit and my Saab 9-5 to a local place for installation. The guy was happy with the configuration of the unit itself, but had attempted to replace the headunit in a 99 Saab before, to no avail. Remove the factory stereo and all the center dash displays will die. I can live without the phone integration and all that, but engine warnings, alarm system, temperature control...

We also talked about integrating into the factory wiring for the cd changer, they're looking into it. I suggested trying to wire a seperate system all together using the RCA outputs and hijacking the speaker wiring, but it turns out one can't have two systems plugged into the power source, or so they say.

To make this work well we will need to get a unit from Saab that does just the displays and leaves the audio to us, or maybe we can port the saab control system to Linux.

Damn Saab. I love the cars, but this is killing me. I was about to buy my wife a new Saab, maybe I'll give her mine and get myself an '88 Dodge. I gotta have the Empeg (and eventually so will my wife.) There's got to be a better solution. I've tried posting to the boards on www.saabnet.com, but have not gotten any responses yet.