Minnie the Media PC
Monday, January 26, 2004
Sunday, January 25, 2004
While visiting baby Isabelle this afternoon I took the opportunity to pick Peter's brains about drivers, because he had MythTV running for a while, also under Mandrake 9.1, using what we believe is the same TV card. So then I copied some of his settings for the bttv driver - but alas, no improvement. But also this afternoon/evening Steve downloaded ALL the Mandrake updates so I'll try doing some upgrading over the next few days and see what happens.
Friday, January 23, 2004
A slight holdup
I downloaded a few more update RPMs, just the MySQL and harddrake ones, and wanted to sneaker-net them across to Minnie. First I tried booting the old kernel so that I could use my card reader - no dice. Nasty fatal looking messages and then something about init not working. So obviously it's not enough to simply point lilo to the old kernel file, obviously something else has changed at the same time.
Next I thought I would try my card reader with the new kernel on the off-chance that it could just possibly be configured in such way that it could read it. Not a good idea. It went into some kind of endless loop continually spewing error messages so I just had to give it the old three-fingered salute, even then it didn't shut down cleanly and needed the Big Red Switch treatment.
So now I think I'll just leave it until I can use Steve's memory key which does work okay. I'll go for a walk instead.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Or maybe not
So it turns out you can't patch the Mandrake kernel. (No, I didn't break it!) You can either wait for updated kernel RPMs to be released, or you can replace the kernel with a generic one.
So Steve downloaded the most recent 9.1 kernel RPM, and I installed that. It boots okay, but the bttv driver still fails to load, plus now I need the source RPM so I can configure it. Maybe I should just buy the 9.2 version and if I wasn't allergic to spending money at the moment that's exactly what I would do.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
I've still got it
I managed to reconfigure, build, and boot the new kernel without any drama, and the card reader now works. It's a little messy to use, popping up error messages because I don't happen to have all four slots occupied, but there's nothing I can do about that. The key thing is, it works, and I can copy the kernel patches across now. Tomorrow I will go a-patching.
USB card reader
I have downloaded sufficient kernel patches to bring Minnie up to 2.4.24, and now I need to find a way to get them onto Minnie so I can install them. It would be overkill to burn a CD for a mere 7MB. I've either got to get a really long network cable, or get Minnie to recognise my card reader and the SmartMedia card that I use to sneaker-net stuff around.
According to the doco that came with the card reader, all I have to do is a little bit of kernel configuration and rebuild the kernel, so that's what's happening in the background as I write. Fingers crossed, then.
Installing Mandrake
We're using Mandrake Linux 9.1 because that's what we happen to have a copy of. Once I decided I was going to completely trash the old Windows installation and use the whole disk it was easy. The hardest part was selecting what packages to install. For the initial setup I went for the following main package groups:
- Office Workstation
- Multimedia Station
- Internet Station
- Network clients
- Configuration
- Console Tools
- Development
- Documentation
- Linux Standard Base
- Web/FTP server
- Database
- KDE
Other requirements include the bttv and saa7134 drivers which will enable the FlyVideo card to work. Both of these are compiled as modules, and saa7134 loads happily but bttv does not. We think we need a more recent kernel (currently 2.4.21), and the question of the day is whether to buy a new Mandrake version or to just upgrade the kernel.
Version 0.1
For the first incarnation of this machine I tried Windows 2000 and Showshifter. It worked, more-or-less, but then it stopped working for the usual unfathomable Windows reasons. I trashed the OS and reinstalled but it still didn't work, and I had other things to do. Meanwhile, Steve bought similar hardware and installed Mandrake, and then didn't do any more on it.
All of this took place sometime last year - and now the time has come to start again. On Monday, Steve finally finished assembling his box (which goes by the name of Parrot) only to find that he couldn't remember what root password he gave it. So now I've trashed the Windows installation I had and replaced it with Mandrake, and we're starting again from there.
Hardware
The top priorities for hardware were performance and quietness. The last thing we wanted was a noisy PC in the living room, but it also had to do what we wanted.
So I ordered a Mini-ITX motherboard and case, a LifeView Flyvideo card, and a 120GB Seagate hard disk that was the quietest I could find at the time. Plus all the other bits that were necessary to make the system go (I'll post all the details in the sidebar when I fish out the order form sometime). All the parts came from Paradigm PCs.
Background
This is a home-brew PVR project. That is, we're building video-playing PCs that will receive TV signals and record programmes for us, and hopefully will also have a "pause live TV" function. We also want to edit recorded video and dump it onto VCDs and/or DVDs which can then be played in other people's DVD players.
