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.