So, I've been making slow but steady progress re-writing the player application on the rio receiver. One thing that might be of use to others is how to get a shell over the network without having to open the box and building an interface to get at the serial port. You can find docs here : http://www.reza.net/rio/nc.html

Also, I've written libs to allow me to output text to the LCD, i'll document that and put it up soon.

Reza

p.s. I find that when I use Jeff's dev-fs-image, the player works fine, but it produces some static/hissing/clicking sounds when the player is running. It stops if I kill the player application. And it doesn't make any of those sounds when I revert back to the original image. Thoughts? Has this happened to anyone else?

I noticed on your website you said the bash shell was slow while the player is running.

This is probably as the player is running at 'real time' priority and bash isn't.
If you modify your shell call to set the priority of the nc command line to real time too before you run it, you should find that the shell is just as responsive as it normally would be.

With the player 'not playing' it should not cause any undue load on the system this way. You may even find it acceptable to use bash while the player is running/playing a song.

I'm not sure what system call you need to change the priority. I guess someone with the source code could tell you [but then they'd have to shoot you...].

I'm no linux hacker on this but getpri()/setpri() is a pair of system calls I remember from way back.
May also be a ioctl or 2?