Sad news

Well my time experimenting of with the VIA EPIA EG 1000 board appear to be over.  I tried upgrading its bios and the process failed After more than an hour it was still running, and apparently bricked the board.

Merde as we say.

So I have replaced it with a ZOTAC Intel Atom N330 based board with an ION graphics processor.  This is a much better board for mythtv purposes.  It is much faster so you can move around the web and do general computing without any of the stickiness that the VIA showed. Moreover, it will display video off the internet including Hulu.com without noticeable delays or artifacts -- which was plain impossible with the VIA.

Finally it is supposed to be HD capable right out of the box.  I don't have an HD TV so can't verify that -- yet.

I got it at newegg.com for less than $200, with powersupply and wifi N included.

Install Ubuntu 9.1 Karmic Koala on VIA EPIA 1000 EG

Having made the mistake of upgrading my backend to karmic koala and in the process breaking mythtv.  It is version 22 in Karmic which is icompatible with the front end I had on my myth frontend (0.21).

That left me with two options.  1) downgrade the backend (ugly) or 2) try to upgrade the frontend.  Luckily I had a spare harddisk so I could do 2 without destroying my earlier install.

I went ahead and downloaded on a PC the Karmic live CD desktop version as an iso and installed it on an USB stick using  the windows uunetid utility.

Unlike my experience with Hardy Heron, the live CD booted from the USB stick worked and the install program from the live CD also worked well -- altho the first time it bombed during the upgrade of the apt repositiories which I suspect was due to a faulty ethernet cable.  The second time I ran it I did not have this problem.

Also of note the install program appears to be at least minimally destructive so it could be done on top of an earlier install.

Install Ubuntu 7.10 on VIA EPIA 10000 EG

Well I got 7.10 installed on my diskless VIA EPIA.

First I installed 7.04 using a bootable USB created with the windows version of unetboot-in.  As before (see previous post) something was seriously wrong with the sources.list generated and I was unable to get all of the repositories updated.  

Among other things that prevented me from upgrading to 7.10.

The solution it turned out was simple.  I disabled all of the repositories in source.list and then executed the upgrade.  This worked, and I now have a working version of 7.10 with sound working out of the box and video running under the VESA driver.

Now I will try installing the VIA drivers.

Buffalo LS-QL/R5

Bought a Buffalo Ls-QL/R5, a network aware server (NAS) that is acually an embedded linux device with apache / printer server and samba set up (altho tightly).

Some have had some success in hacking into earlier versions, so that they can give them additional functionalities etc. but so far no one with this device.

Like many devices in the world it is marketed as a window centric tool, but can be used in a linux environment.

However, many people have difficulty mounting it correctly. The solution that worked for me was:



mount //192.168.1.203/share /mnt/BUF -o user=myname,password=mypwrd,r,w,dmask=0777,fmask=0777


from the command line or in fstab



//192.168.1.203/share /mnt/BUF -o user=myname,password=mypwrd,r,w,dmask=0777,fmask=0777


How to get sound working in Karmic Koala

Could you please try the following, note that this is only if you run pulseaudio in your user session, not system wide:
1. Remove all pulseaudio related files from your home directory, so .pulse_cookie and .pulse/* leave the .pulse directory in tact for the next step.
2. Create /home/your-username/.pulse/client.conf and add the following line to it:
autospawn = no
This is so that when we kill pulseaudio, it won't start right back up again when we don't want it to.
3. Kill pulseaudio with "pulseaudio -k"
4. Reset your alsa volume settings with the following command: "sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset". You will be asked for your password due to using the sudo command.
 5. Start pulseaudio again with "start-pulseaudio-x11".
6. Check the alsa mixer again, and report back as to whether your volume levels are reset to 0.
If you have any questions as to the above steps, please let me know also.
 affects ubuntu/pulseaudio
 status incomplete

Karmic disaster

Upgraded t Karmic from Jaunty Jacalope the other day. Not a success.

The upgrade process failed leaving my system in some sort of half and half limbo.

First step was to hand install the python packages as this seems to be where the upgrade crashed.

After that all looked good, but in fact the system was still half and half. With all sorts of programs operating oddly. After a repeated cycle of upgrades I am hoping that things are starting to resolve themselves but am not very confident.

Update:

My sound is all f-ed up. and so is Mythtv altho I managed to fix the LIRC using the same steps outlined in my earlier post (I knew there was a reason I was taking notes).

Setting up an IR Blaster for Mythtv under Kubuntu

Comcast is moving to an all digital format, requiring mythtv installations such as mine that were operating off of their analog feed to install either one of their digital boxes or a DTA (Digital-to-analog) box in order to continue receiving their signal. The problem is that one can no-longer control the television station being received through the tuner seated in your computer.

The solution is to install an infrared blaster (a device that emulates the remote control) on the PC and use it to change the channels on the DTA comcast provides.

Being Linux that is neither as easy as it sounds nor is information on how to do it as easy to find as you might hope. I am writing this as an aide memoire so that if I upgrade or whatever I can find all of the pieces and infos needed. Hopefully it will also help someone else.

First the hardware.

I purchased an IR blaster for 12.95 from IRBLASTER.info, which is recommended on various mythtv web sites. It works of any free serial port on your computer -- which sounds easy, except thereare no serial ports on my system -- having been more or less made obsolescent by cable modems and USB ports (the world keeps moving on)!

A little digging and I found that on the motherboard (an XFX GEFORCE 8200) there was an outlet for connecting a serial port. As I had a serial port attached to a ribbon connector lieing around from an old computer I was able to get around that -- but given there was no documentation of the MoBo I had no idea whether I had installed it correctly.


Now the software.
After a lot of digging including reading the really useless (outdated and needlessly complicated) discussion of installations that the IR Blaster site links to I found an excellent how to here that covers all the steps necessary to make this device work while I found a LIRCD.conf file for the PACE DTA50 supplied by comcast here here .

The instructions worked almost flawlessly except that having a slightly newer version of Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackelope) than documented (Hardy Heron) some things did not work out exactly as described. However, work arounds came relatively easily.


Getting LIRC to run properly

The biggest trick was to get LIRC running properly. There are all sorts of sites on the web describing what are really complicated solutions here. The one I found that worked relatively easily (with some modification) was the official MythTv Ubuntu install.

It gives great step by step instructions that work (with some blips along way).


Blip 1
The site tells you to execute the following line

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

and advises you that a

"A Configuration should appear
Choose the OK button and press enter (tab key to move across)
Make sure only the serial module is selected, use the space bar to select,
and then press enter on OK
You will be given an option to build the modules. Be sure not to build the modules here
You may be given an option to replace with a new version. Be sure to
choose to Install the package maintainer's version"

However this configuration does not appear. 
This is not a problem -- there is a note to this effect in the
current version of the site.


Second Blip

A bit later the how to suggests that you execute the following commands.

sudo m-a update,prepare
sudo rm /usr/src/lirc*deb
sudo m-a clean lirc
sudo m-a a-i -f lirc
sudo depmod -a

On my system this all worked fine except that the last command
popped up a text-based dialog indicating that there were errors and asking
if I wanted to see the log.  I looked at the log and it was broadly uninformative.
As it turns out whatever the problems that were encountered they did not affect my
installation and all worked fine.



Third Blip(let)

When I got to the section entitled 

Remote Configuration

I just used the configuration file that I had found here to create a lirc.conf file for the PACEDTA supplied by Comcast.



Fourth Blip -- Use the PACEDTA file directly as your lircd.conf
One of the most important features of this site is it includes a definition of the LIRC file that will send the right commands to your dta so that the blaster can actually change channels etc. V. useful.

One hiccup I ran into was that the using the include command in lircd.conf as described on the site did not seem to work. I got around that by overwriting the lircd.conf file with the specific one provided on the how to site.

With those small modifications, I had my blaster up and running in a bit under two hours. Not bad.


UPDATE

As indicated above I moved over to Karmic Koala (not a smooth process). Anyway there I has to recreate a ch_chan.sh script to change channels. I placed this in /usr/local/bin/ch_chan.sh