There's no text display capability in our kernel so all text is done from user space. This means that on production units until the player runs no text is displayed. The player currently displays text like "Starting mixer...", "Starting audio..." on startup but this may change.

My development unit has Jim Pick's (http://www.jimpick.com) debian image on it and runs full init scripts. I've created a script called echox that calls echo and runs a little program called scrawl that writes text on the empeg-car screen. Using this in the init scripts means that I see messages like "Checking root file system..." during bootup. This is not done on production units since they do not run a standard init (and don't need to fsck on startup anyway).

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Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)