Another personal project

Yet again, I'm using this blog as a diary of my attempts to do something rather than writing something interesting. Hey, who knows? Maybe it'll work and THEN it'll become interesting.

So, what's the project? Quite simply put, it's in-car entertainment for the kids.

You see, there's the obvious easy option of buying a dual screen DVD setup. But they're a bit rubbish; in many cases still expensive; and the kids have to watch the same thing. Now, any of you out there with multiple kids will know that they NEVER want to watch the same thing. So how am I going to beat this?

Well, the plan is to use a Raspberry Pi and a couple of cheap tablets. At the moment this is all Pi (ha!) in the sky, but the idea runs thus...

• I find a MiFi/Battery Pack combo that is capable of powering the device plugged into it whilst it's charging. This provides continous (hopefully) playback at times when I switch off the ignition (like petrol stations).
• Off this I run a Pi and a USB hard drive (not sure how the Hard drive is getting power yet... possibly from the MiFi/Battery Pack?)
• The Pi runs some kind of DLNA software serving out copies of the kids' various ripped DVDs
• Also, the MiFi has a 4G SIM in it providing internet access...
• The kids each have a cheap Android Tablet attached to the back of the front seat headrests.
• These tablets are able to stream media from the Pi or over 4G to entertain the kids.

The major obstacles here are, I think, finding an appropriate MiFi/Battery Pack and, potentially, the bandwidth available as I'm doubting that the Pi will be powerful enough to transcode.

So, research begins, will post updates on my findings.

Experimenting with Deploying Windows 10 via MDT 2013 Update 1 Preview

Riveting title I know. As with many of my previous posts, this is more of a dumping ground for my thoughts and findings than a full blown blog post designed to guide someone through the process. Might help someone somewhere though...

So, building this on a test server running 2012 R2.

Joined to the domain and then installed the WDS role.

Following the guide at http://goo.gl/kVjglF

First major hitch is when coming to download the Windows 10 ADK. The installer gives the error:

Install did not compete successfully.
An error occurred while installing "Documentation"
Unable to verify the integrity of downloaded content. It might be corrupter. Please check your network connection and try again.
Review the Setup log files or contact your system administrator.

A bit of rooting in the logs and a small amount of Google-Fu seems to indicate the the source files have been updated but the installer hasn't. Tracked down an updated installer at http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/1/9/8197FEB9-FABE-48FD-A537-7D8709586715/adk/adksetup.exe which seems to work.

Following that, pretty much a standard run if things so far. Installed the ADK, checked for updates, launched MDT.

Within MDT I've  created a Deployment Share as usual, imported the Operating System from the ISO for build 162, and created a standard task sequence.

As of just now, I'm updating the Deployment Share and waiting for the boot wims to be generated so that I can feed them into WDS.