Yesterday I found a small pile of Compaq IA-1s and remembering seeing this board some time ago, I decided to buy one in hopes of using it to play mp3 files in my bedroom. I bought one, cleared the BIOS and tried loading both Jailbait and wildwildwes' latest available midori. I much preferred the out-of-the-box feature set of midori to Jailbait, so that's what I went with. With a little playing around I was able to connect to a Solaris 7 system over NFS and play mp3 files from the NFS-mounted system using both mpg123 and xmms. Unfortunately, the playback would hang a few seconds into the audio and remain hung for seconds to minutes before continuing again for a few more seconds.
Today I solved this problem by building a new midori kernel and using wildwildwes' build kit to make a CF image for the IA-1. The only significant configuration change I made to the config of the kernel I built was to disable nfsv3, though I of course left nfs itself enabled.
With that one config change that disabled NFS v3 (essentially forcing NFS v2), I've now been playing various mp3s using xmms for about 90 minutes with no glitches at all.
Thanks everyone for hacking on these things and documenting the procedures so well that I could jump in this easily.
I've been doing this at work, so now I have to take one of my old boxes and build a file server to park somewhere at home where I don't have to listen to the fans. I think I'll put an IA-1 in my bedroom (for old time radio shows) and one on the living room stereo (for music).
Now that I've got this working, I think I need to go buy the other two IA-1s before someone else realizes what they're good for. They're at my Wal-Mart for $120 and being sold as new, though they've obviously been used since the batteries are installed in the keyboard and the manuals have been thumbed through. Since the first one was hackable, I've got high hopes that the other two are as well.
Is $120 too much to pay for slightly used IA-1s? It seems pretty good to me for a silent PC that can play music and do ssh and VNC to my other Windows and Linux boxes. If anyone knows of a significantly less expensive way to get hackable IA-1s, let me know.
