It's been a while...
Minnie spent about a year being a Windows box for other people to use for video editing using Windows applications. Then it went to David to play with for a couple of weeks, so that he could get some idea of how a C3 processor performs.

It's now running SUSE, and still the TV card doesn't work properly (although I haven't yet done any serious delving into the guts of the problem).

Meanwhile, I bought a commercial hard disk video recorder, which I'm only slightly unhappy with... and Minnie's poor little 900MHZ CPU has been left in the dust by Moore's Law.

So now I'm a little uncertain what Minnie's future will hold.
- posted by LRW @ 3:21 pm

 
Nope, haven't cracked it
On closer inspection, it turns out that although the TV card was apparently recognised during the 9.2 install (on Parrot) and upgrade (on Minnie), it still isn't recognised by the hardware wizard thingy on either box, and the bttv driver still fails to load.  So it's back to the drawing board.
- posted by LRW @ 10:40 pm

 
Might have cracked it
Steve brought home a copy of Mandrake 9.2, then eventually got around to installing it on Parrot and it recognised the TV card.  So I've upgraded Minnie, and whaddayano, it recognises Minnie's TV card too.  As it should, since it's the same TV card.

So now what I have to do is find the FAQs and HOWTOs and figure out what to do next.

- posted by LRW @ 2:01 pm

 
Grumble
Installed a pile of updated packages, still no go.
- posted by LRW @ 11:14 pm

 
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.
- posted by LRW @ 11:40 pm

 
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.
- posted by LRW @ 12:19 pm

 
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.
- posted by LRW @ 11:18 pm