[slinkelist] FAQ: linux driver?

[Sami-Pekka Haavisto]

> Does anyone have a slink-e controlled from a linux box?  Are there
> alternative
> solutions for building S-link based jukebox systems for linux?

I have written a small software to control my CX350. It's 100% in Python,
so it should work in other unix-like systems as well, probably with slight
modifications to the serial port code. It could even work in Windows,
Python and GTK have both been ported...

It has basically a simple server, which communicates with Slink-e through
serial port, and listens to a TCP-port. Client software can connect to
this server and allocate any Slink-e port. This makes it simple to have
different programs to use different Slink-e ports, and also simplifies
the programming while it's the server that handles parsing multi-part
messages.

The actual CD-controller client software uses GTK widget set, and has
already simple but working playlist editor. I have used it myself for a
month or so. It still depends on my own little CD-database I've been
using since 1994, but I'm going to move the data to a simple ASCII-based
datafile later, and also add CDDB support. I've been too busy lately to
make it completely self-contained, but perhaps I'll look into it soon,
seems like there would be interest :-)

I haven't released any of this software yet. But after I fix some bugs
I'll release it under some open source license, possibly GPL. Also, only
the server module is of general use at the moment, the actual
CD-controller has several things hardcoded to work with specifically my
CX350. I don't have access to any other changers, so I couldn't test it
myself even if I coded some more functionality into it.

I have a little page with an old screenshot of the playlist editor at
<URL:http://www.iki.fi/sph/slink/>. It still looks pretty much the same,
though I've made some changes since. Oh, and there's also a link to my
WWW-playlist, which is updated by the software in real time ;-)

Any thoughts? If there are more people interested in coding this thing
in python something could be organized. Something like a CVS-tree for
development might not be a bad idea at all.

-- 
Sami-Pekka Haavisto | "What do you want?"
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sph@iki.fi          |
www.iki.fi/sph/ <*> |