Hey Tony, we're talking the JEmplode wishlist thread about simplifying 3rd party app installs to a point and click thing which should at least ease this concern.

But what you are asking for here is a technical challenge - unix and linux systems usually only pass control to userland once - via init. init is then responsible for spawning whatever is needed in userland, and the userland/kernel interactions at that point are fairly limited to system calls from userland.

The problem here is that the empeg-supplied init is locked down to only do one thing - start the player. And always tells the player to hog the serial port. Even if hijack were able to start arbitrary userland applications, gpsapp would still need to start before the player in order to work (and then the player wouldn't) . Now this again could be solved in hijack - we could (optionally) remap the serial device (/dev/ttyS0) to a dummy device that does nothing but dump the data, and then tell gpsapp to use /dev/ttyS1 that would really point to the port. This potentially would allow hijack to remap the port at will from a menu item - allowing either gpsapp or player serial messages to be using the real port at will. If my serial port expansion plans come to any fruitition then it would use a scheme similar to this - but I digress.

What would pretty much solve the init issue is if the empeg guys included preinit in the distribution. Only hijack kernels would use it - so it would be transparent to non-HJ users. And whether the player uses the serial port should be a config.ini setting.

Once that is done it is comparatively easy to get JEmplode (or some other software) to deal with the rest of 3rd party app installs.