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epiaix
A Fedora Core 4 based live CD with a multimedia bias
Status: October 19th 2005 it boots!
Update March 2006
Just about the time I got this booting and running a special epia kernel the livecd project started switching to FC5. Many things have changed and the disk has to be started over to be compatible with FC5 and kadischi. The good news is that it will be better! As soon as am able to migrate my hush to FC5 I will rebuild a new liveCD for epeia.
Hasn't this been done before?
Yes and no. There are other live CD's for the Epia. There are other multimedia live CD's. This one is Epia specific _and_ multimedia orientated. There are also many places with information on turning on the multimedia features of the VIA Epia motherboards. We won't duplicate that information but point to it. Think of this as an executive summary of what has been done already. And with a new twist - something that hasn't been done elsewhere.
http://www.epios.net/ is a Gentoo based distribution with VIA video drivers.
http://kanotix.com/index.php?&newlang=eng is a Debian Live CD based on Knoppix and a VDR version has been made. http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/Kanotix_-_VDR_Live_CD although this is in German the CD will boot into English. It loads your DVB-S modules and starts VDR showing live TV if you are pointing at the correct satellite.
My own personal PVR is also capable of booting into full screen live video if I wish. As I use it to work on during the day I have a large button "Watch TV" that I click on after the days work is done. Interface is one of the things I intend to work on once the basic functions are in place.
One live CD that inspired me because it is so small (200 Mb) is Beatrix.
There are many live CD projects, most are desktop orientated. Those that are multimedia orientated are not hardware specific.
My own hardware setup is "mainstream": a VIA Epia M10000 powerd hush with 512 Mb RAM, DVD drive and a 40 Gb hard drive. I have added a Skystar2 "budget" DVB-S card and a home made serial port IR receiver.
Lets get into some details...