Dial-A-Song Diary, Part 2

OK hurdle number one has cropped up early. It's been a long time since I've worked in a command line environment. I didn't feel like installing X Window on this machine since it will never get used. Unlike Georgy (our geek candidate for California governor) I am neither a vi nor emacs user. I usually use pico or joe to edit text files on the command line. And I've got text files galore to edit. But there's neither program on this minimal install. Rats. Fortunately curl is installed, so I download a copy of nano - a better pico. It's an RPM so installation is a snap. I'm feeling a little better.

• mgetty+vgetty have compiled just fine and seem to be working
• I've modified my inittab to start vgetty on boot

I can't test either though because I never did find a modem cable. So while I'm waiting for Radio Shack to open, I'm downloading the additional software I'll need using curl and ftp. I've got to convert the MP3s on the CD into WAV form. vgetty comes with a command line program to convert the WAV into the pvr format required by the modem. My first try, mpg123, can dump the MP3 as raw audio, but wav2pvr doesn't understand that. So now I'm trying SoX. With the addition of underbit's libmad library, SoX is supposed to be able to convert MP3s directly. libmad is the same library mpg123 uses, so the quality should be fine. When I ./configure SoX it sees libmad, but for some reason the compiled program can't find the libmad.so.0 library. I have to drive Henry to his baseball game and get his cousin to his soccer game in Sonoma, so I'll have to take a break now. I'll get the cable on the way home and try to solve this library problem. I'll start by putting links to libmad.so.0 in all the usual places.