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Finally spent a few hours on my HTPC. Previously the Hauppauge HVR-2200 was working fine in Kaffeine, but was not working in MythTV. I finally resolved this issue, and typed up some details here:
The tuner card is now working under MythTV to "Watch TV"; however the programme guide is still not updating correctly over EIT. In theory this should happen automatically after a full scan, but for some reason this seems not to be working. It may be that this is because I have simply not left the backend to idle for long enough for an EIT scan to be initiated.
More news when I have it.
In an effort to make my desktop a little more elegant, I have designed some new wallpapers for use with KDE on Debian. They may be a little too bling for some of you, but I'm quite pleased with them. All created using free software, in the form of The Gimp. In the spirit of free software, I have uploaded to http://kde-look.org/ under a Creative Commons licence.
As a died-in-the-wool KDE user, I'm just coming to terms with KDE4 and mostly loving it. A few niggles remain, but in the main it is very good indeed. But I suppose I would hesitate to recommend it to a new user. Having seen and heard much praise for the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, which uses the Gnome desktop, I thought I'd give it a go.
I started by downloading the ISO image from the Ubuntu website and followed my instructions to Make A Linux USB Key, basically by formatting in super-floppy format (which I find to be the most consistently successful method) and using Unetbootin to write the ISO to the USB Key. Using a USB key is more convenient, more portable and more environmentally friendly than burning a CD/DVD.
I took a spare laptop, an HP NX7300, and inserted the USB Key. I entered the BIOS settings and changed the boot order to boot first from USB. I then booted up the laptop.
HP are not know for their Linux compatibility, but Ubuntu booted up with an attractive boot splash, before logging straight into the very attractively themed Gnome desktop. The new colour scheme is purple, which is very attractive, although brown still exists in the OpenOffice splash screen to remind us of what used to be.
As expected, network manager failed to activate, and I knew from past experience that I would need to load the proprietary broadcom driver. Continuing to play it dumb, I waited to see if I would get any help from Ubuntu. After about half a minute, the restricted drivers' manager appeared on the top panel, although there was no guidance as to why it had appeared, nor what to do with it. I clicked on it and then clicked on the option to install the Broadcom STR driver and clicked activate.
After a minute or so it had loaded the Broadcom driver from the USB stick and I noticed that the wireless light had illuminated on the laptop. Promising! Unfortunately it then suggested I reboot to load the new driver; which obviously I can't do, as I am running off a USB stick and would effectively start from scratch again if I rebooted. I decided to just wait and, sure enough, after a while when I clicked on the wireless symbol on the top panel it offered my local wireless access point. I selected it, and entered the encryption key, and I was connected.
At this point I had a completely usable desktop environment, including a full office suite (OpenOffice.org), a working web browser (Firefox) and everything else you could possibly wish in a modern desktop environment, all working off a USB stick. I still find that just amazing.
I must admit that I am surprised by Gnome, it looks gorgeous, it feels very integrated, as if it had been designed as a whole, rather than being a collection of applications brought together. No it's not my much loved Debian, and no it's not my much loved KDE, but it does feel easy to use, very uniform and just… well "right".
I was particularly impressed by Rhythmbox, which had the built in music store, podcast reader, and local collection. This does look like an application which would reassure an erstwhile iTunes user. It's probably not as good as amaroK, but having pushed amaroK on my mother and regretted it mightily, I think Rhythmbox is a good choice, being infinitely more user friendly.
I even set-up my Gmail account in Evolution, simply by clicking on the mail icon in the top panel and following the wizard to set up my Gmail account. I played completely dumb, it provided all the necessary server information and network settings for me, and all I needed to know was my Gmail address and password. That is incredible, anyone could set up their email if it's that easy.
Having tested it, just to decide whether to recommend it to friends and family, I find myself sorely tempted to install it on my own laptop.
I recently made a payment to an online supplier, via Nochex. The supplier failed to come up with the goods and then failed to respond to my emails. I submitted a support ticket to Nochex, and they promised to respond with 48 hours, but failed to do so.
After conducting further research, it seems that Nochex itself does not have the best reputation 
according to Review Centre:
Further to this, I contacted them again, and once again they have failed to respond within 24 hours.
Apparently it was a 24 hour experiment, but Google saw sense and ended it 10 hours early, after the twitterverse went beserk.
Now those that want pictures of kittens as their background can and the rest of us can keep our plain simple and fast search page. After spending the day using http://ixquick.com, I'll be glad to return to google.com, which is still the best search engine that I have ever used.
When are we going to see a decent open source search engine, maybe distributed in some way amongst its user base?
Why do we use Google? Because it is lightweight and fast. What could Google do to make themselves less appealing? Well, I suppose they could add a desktop background that adds to the clutter of the page and requires everyone to download a pointless image, but they'd never do something that stupid, would they?
And they have.
I can only imagine Google are wanting to reduce their monopoly and increase competition in the search engine market, and perhaps that is to be applauded.
Okay, so what can I use instead of Google? I think I'll try Bing, supposedly their privacy policy is better as well.
Spent some time setting up my wife's email on the new HTPC, using Kmail and disconnected IMAP. Installed Google Chrome. Added a KDE Plasmoid on the desktop for Facebook and Twitter, which hopefully my wife will like. Other than that I have had no time to spend on the completing the MythTV installation. More soon hopefully.
Wow, this really is a second post in one day!
Following on from the DPI issue, I decided to throw science to the wind and just set DPI to 96 x 96 rather than 50 x 50, and the login screen looks better and the font size is improved (slightly larger).
Next, I decided that I ought to check that the TV Tuner was properly detected, but whilst it was detected correctly, it was unsure of the card number, and was unable to download the firmware. This is not entirely surprising as this TV card is fairly recent and (as usual) the Hauppauge do not themselves support Linux.
The following link provided me with the basis for fixing this issue:
But in the event I only needed the following:
$ cd ~ $ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/22xxdrv_27086.zip $ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip $ wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/extract.sh $ sh extract.sh $ sudo su # cp *.fw /lib/firmware/`uname -r`/ # echo "options saa7164 card=4" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf # exit $
Then reboot. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some time to continue setting up the TV card under MythTV; but for now the aerial input is required by our old MythTV system in order to record Doctor Who :).
A second post on the same day, has hell frozen over? No, actually I put the wrong date on yesterday's post. Oops.
The DPI problem was fixed very easily by following the instructions on the link I provided in my previous post, I calculated that my Sony Bravia KDL 32S3000 had dimensions of 700mm x 390mm and a native resolution of 1366x768.
$ xdpyinfo | grep dimensions $ xdpyinfo | grep "dots per inch"
Converting the millimetres to inches and dividing the resolution by the inches dimensions gave me DPI of 50x50, surprisingly low. I believe this is because the KDL 32S3000 is not a full HD TV but only 1080i. Setting this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf cured the problem with the KDM login manager.
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
Option "DPI" "50 x 50"
EndSection
Changing the connectors around corrected the problem, I had assumed that the arrows on the connectors indicated +ve, when clearly they must indicate -ve, fixed and the LEDs all work fine.
Installed the Nvidia binary driver, which worked fine, except that, as I've found on a few installs recently the KDE screen DPI defaults to something absurd, resulting in unreadably small fonts. Easily fixed in KDE, via System Settings (as long as you know your way around!), but haven't yet found out how to do it in KDM (the login manager). This is not a huge problem, as it is easy enough to type in your password, and anyway on a home theatre PC you probably want it automatically logging in. That said, I am determined to fix this problem when I have some time. Interestingly this was also the case on our existing mythbox, which has completely different hardware, the common thread being the nvidia driver. I suspect the issue may be related to the KDE virtual desktop, and the nvidia driver calculating this back to a reasonable DPI. The following link may help, I will give this a go when I have some time:
Anyway, the good news is that, with the binary driver installed, the standard KDE compositing is working beautifully.
As to sound, this is still not working via HDMI, but is working fine through the sound outputs. This seems to be a widespread issue, which I think has been resolved, so it's just a matter of waiting for the fix to filter downstream. In the meantime, I will continue to work as we do on our existing mythbox, with a 2.1 speaker system plugged into the HTPC.
At last the 24-pin ATX PSU extension cable has arrived - enabling me to perform a test boot.
It switched on okay, but the front LEDs were not working, neither the power nor the disk LED; so it seems that they are not wired up correctly, although I really can't see how I could have got it wrong.
It booted into a Kubuntu 10.04 USB stick without any problems. The network card was detected correctly and I was able to browse the Internet without any configuration. The Nvidia card was detected correctly, using the open source driver, obviously I will install the Nvidia binary driver. The only strangeness was the lack of sound via the HDMI cable, but looking in the BIOS afterward I noticed an option "Audio via HDMI" which I have enabled, it was set to auto, but maybe that'll make a difference.
It is difficult to say how quiet it is at present, as any sound it was making was being drowned out by our noisy old mythbox.
I can't wait to have a decent chunk of time to start the installation.
Well the build went quite well. I encountered two problems:
The Intel Atom A330 ION motherboard had two prongs for the Power LED, but the Lian-Li PC-C37 case had a cable for a three prong connector. The cable on has two wires, so I got around this issue by levering up the plastic catch holding one of the cables and moved it into the middle connector, which then fitted the motherboard fine, just with the now vacant connector overlapping the connectors.
The second problem that I encountered was the question of which way up the PSU should go. Normally an ATX PSU sits at the top of a tower case with the fan downwards, pulling the hot air out of the case. In a desktop (horizontal) PC this is never going to be as effective. With my case, there is no space below the PSU, so that the fan would be drawing air from nowhere and exhausting it out the back of the PC. Not only will this not cool the case, it will also burn the PSU in a very short time. By mounting the PSU upside down, the cool air should be drawn in from outside, via the top vent, cooling the PSU and exhausting out the back. This does mean that the PSU is not helping to cool the case, but at least it is not adding heat into the case.
Unfortunately, mounting the PSU upside down has meant that the power cables are furthest from the motherboard, with the result that the main 24-pin lead does not reach. It seems that extension leads are available, and I'm to have a go at getting one from Maplin in Guildford today.
This lack of PSU fan cooling for the case does mean that we are very reliant on the two case fans. The case does allow for several more case fans if necessary, although the Intel Atom processor shouldn't be generating too much heat.
Hopefully the following should be a slideshow of the build. I'm sorry to say that I didn't take many interim photos, so this slideshow is rather a before/after:
These days building PCs is not a black art - the connectors are all labelled - and the motherboards generally have a helpful manual detailing exactly what goes where. Building a PC is primarily a challenge from the perspective of making sure that you buy compatible components and that you design in sufficient cooling.
With luck my next post will be the power-up and install of Kubuntu 10.04 with MythTV!
Just a reminder of what I was wanting for our HTPC:
I started, perversely, with the case. Normally you would start with the cpu/mb, but I knew that, in order to get spouse approval, it had to look right. You can spend from 20gbp to 1000gbp on cases, and I dare say more. I wanted something that looked like a black HiFi separate, both in dimensions and styling. I would have thought that there would have been a considerable choice, but there really wasn't, the only one I found was the Lian-Li PC-C37. It would seem to be a well made quality case, for about 100gbp. I would have liked to have spent a little less, but really there was no choice whatsover.
The Lian-Li PC-C37 takes both Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX motherboards. Well that's just fine, given that my aim was a low power, silent and powerful PC, really the Intel Atom was the only choice and they invariably come in Mini-ITX motherboards. Well there is a vast array of Intel Atom motherboards on the market but, oddly enough, almost all of them had problems. Most of them only had 4 usb ports, which would be okay, just. Almost none of them had DVI, let alone HDMI. One motherboard stood out from the rest, the Asrock A330ION. Yes it's the old Atom 330, but it allowed the faster DDR3 RAM, and the specification of the motherboard was fantastic, including:
That feature set is almost unbelievable, (4+2 SATA!! 4+4 USB!! DDR3!!!) by the time I had read the specification, I barely cared about the price. And if you need convincing read the following:
I also bought 2gb of compatible DDR3 RAM.
Well, as I said in my last post, we need to have DVB-T, and of course I have my Hauppauge Nova-T500 PCI card. Ah, but I have just bought a motherboard that only has PCI-Express; so a new card is required. I do hope my wife isn't reading this. Anyway, I like Hauppauge products, and the HVR-2200 is the obvious PCI-Express low profile dual DVB-T tuner card. No decision to make really, other than should I pay twice the amount for the HVR-4400, which has satellite capability, err no, have to draw the line somewhere ;).
Well, we're making a lower power device, so we need low-power drives. Two were recommended to me, the Seagate Barracuda LP Series and the Western Digital Caviar Green Series. Starting to get rather concerned about the money I have been spending, I decided to opt for a relatively low capacity of 500gb, but to go for two drives, so that I could configure a RAID1 array. For those that don't know, a RAID1 array means that you have the same data on both drives, so that if you lose one drive, you don't lose your data. In short, your data is mirrored to the two drives. This doesn't replace backups, but it certainly saves a headache if you lose one of your drives.
It was suggested to me that I should use a NAS for storage, but I don't particularly want two machines on almost permanently. I already have an Icybox NAS, which I have stopped using after it ate two drives; so I don't trust it and I don't particularly want it. We'll probably configure our HTPC to behave as a NAS as well as an HTPC.
All the hardware is now ordered, with the exception of the PSU, as I have one in my stores somewhere, hopefully it will be compatible! More tomorrow, when hopefully I will be starting the build.
We bought our current media centre in 2003, choosing Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition (XPMCE). This was a disaster. If it was an open source application, then I would say that the first edition of XPMCE was worse than Alpha quality, being utterly unusable. We upgraded to 2004 at the first opportunity, it was marginally better, possibly Alpha quality. At last we upgraded to 2005, and we had a barely usable system, Beta quality I would say. It still crashed regularly, but it no longer lost all our channel set-up every day or two. Those that say that Linux is free if your time is free have never spent evening after evening setting up XPMCE.
In 2008 we upgraded to Mythbuntu 8.10. My wife was easy to persuade, simply because she could not see how Linux could possibly be worse than Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition. And so it proved, it wasn't perfect by any means, but it was just good enough that we never regretted the change.
Conventional wisdom is that, if you have a working MythTV system, then you should leave it well alone; but I decided that I wanted to move to KDE from the standard XFCE. It was only after the installation was well under-way that I realised that this meant KDE 4.1, which was an unusable version. Kicking myself for such stupidity, I quickly upgraded to 9.04 and 9.10. Both upgrades went almost flawlessly, and the system has been pretty good ever since.
Unfortunately we've come to hate the Evesham emedia station that runs our MythTV. I stupidly bought four PCs from Evesham, and have always regretted it. Evesham have a good reputation, but my experience is that the hardware is very poor indeed. Specifically it has always been very noisy and suffered from overheating. In addition we have issues with USB support on this PC in Ubuntu. Something to do with OHCI, UCHI etc, I forget what exactly. It's also ugly as sin. In short it was not a good buy and we have always regretted it.
If you're interested you can read a review on this god-awful PC here:
Having read this very positive review, I can only assume that Evesham reduced the component quality significantly by the time I bought this machine.
So we've decided to replace our media centre. I have considered XBMC and Boxee, but with such a poor Internet connection, we really do still need to get our TV via our aerial. And that means MythTV, as far as I know.
I considered buying an Acer Revo, but a huge prejudice against Acer put me off this decision (oh god, not Acer, not ever). I did not consider for a second buying a dedicated XP MCE machine and putting MythTV onto it - we've experienced what can go wrong first hand - and I wanted 100% control over the components.
So what are we looking for in our new media centre (or Home Theatre PC as the jargon now has it!)?
In my next post I will run through the hardware I've chosen.
Yes once again I come to complete my tax return, last time (see 11/01/2009: UK Self-Assessment for Linux) I created a page Submit A Uk Self-Assessment Return Under Linux, but it was a far from successful exercise.
Given that that page is now a year old and my next year's return is required, I thought it was an opportune time to update it. Unfortunately nothing much has changed, the list of personal tax applications has shrunk, as TaxCalc's market domination continues. The only Linux-compatible competitor seems to still be ftax and it requires Acrobat Reader, which isn't available for 64-bit Linux.
The problem is that you don't really want to mess about with your personal tax, especially when that includes on-line submission. You need to have faith in the company that offers the product, and you need them to have sufficient numbers of customers that, if there is a problem, it gets fixed quickly.
In short, the only meaninful competition for TaxCalc would seem to be HMRC's own web-based offering. If it weren't for my positive experiences in using TaxCalc, the convenience of being able to import the previous year's return, and the fact that I have a Windows virtual-machine on my laptop, I would probably try out the HMRC system. As it is, sadly, the Windows-only TaxCalc wins again.
See Blog 2009 for my older postings.
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