First program advice

Hi guys,
I've had this wonderful empeg for quite a few years now and have been meaning to do something with it. A recent hard drive crash has meant I've needed to tinker with it again which has rekindled the enthusiasm
Anyhoo, I just had a few wonders....
Apart from the bash shell, can the empeg run any other script parsers such as python or perl?
If not I assume I'm stuck with c programming and compiling on windows using cygwin and a cross-compiling tool chain? I'm a c# programmer by trade but like the idea of simple scripts in this environment.
I have 2 project ideas. One to control my alarm system via the serial port (which I havent begun as I think the clifford needs a dongle). The second will likely require the empeg to undertake its own music encoding. I wonder how long this would take the player and whether anyone has heard of anything such as lame being compiled for it?

Cheers!

Rob

You could conceivably compile perl or python, but I doubt that it's worth your while. If bash won't do what you want (as much as I dislike it, it's reasonably powerful), yes, you're pretty much stuck compiling a binary, though it need not be written in C, necessarily.

I seem to remember someone compiling lame for the empeg, but it's not fast and it doesn't really have anywhere to write output to. You might be able to stream data to the audio device, but that's hardly the type of output lame would produce.

You should be wary of some of the idiosyncrasies of the empeg's serial port before you start down that road. Someone else is probably more versed in that area than I am.

Thanks for the quick reply
I don't tink the serial port project is a goer (I think at the time I was looking for an excuse to do something and thought it would be cool to be able to change the noises of the alarm from the empeg!)
The other project would require something like lame to encode directly onto the empeg's drive effectively adding new tracks. I'm sure there's more hurdles adding to the database and encoding a fid, but I'd still be very interested if anyone has compiled lame for the empeg.

Cheers!

Rob

There was once a whole Debian environment for the empeg.

Another source of pre-built binaries would be the Netwinder archives -- most Netwinder code runs on the empeg just fine, since they share identical CPU chips. The Netwinder is a small book-sized dual-ethernet server from the mid/late 1990s, produced by Corel and Rebel.com.

EDIT: here's a link: netwinder.org. I don't see lame, but there's hundreds of other packages, including Perl and pals.

Cheers

Wow, thats loads of stuff, lets see what I can cram on the old box...
Cheers for that, I might look at compiling lame myself if I feel daring

Rob

Quote:
There was once a whole Debian environment for the empeg.

That may have been based on the Sharp Zaurus. I seem to recall getting a number of apps from the Zaurus archives.