The biggest problem with the carputer I have is that its almost impossible to configure it easily — especially when its mounted in my car. So, what I’ve done is used VMWare to create a virtual machine that runs Linux on it, and then I used rsync to do a lil something like so from the virtual machine:

/usr/bin/rsync -apzv --delete --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys --exclude=/var/log --exclude=/var/lock --exclude=/var/tmp --exclude=/var/run --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp -e "ssh" root@carputer_address:/ /

Which, of course, this command copies practically everything onto the virtual machine. Its a great solution so far (since you can easily copy changes back), the only real challenge was that I had to recompile the kernel to support the VMWare hardware. Haven’t gotten X working yet either, but I’m pretty sure that will be trivial compared to the fact that my carputer supports SSE2, but the host computer doesn’t, so I had to do the following

emerge -e world

after adjusting my build settings… grr. Recompiling 632 packages right now actually. Kept getting ‘invalid instruction’ errors all over the place.