Ubuntu and 1.44mb floppy drive

A neighbour recently had a computer crash, and needed to get some files off floppy disks for her school. Luckily my old Athlon700 serving as a mythbuntu PVR still had a floppy drive.

I inserted the disk, and tried to mount it. It said the device did not exist. Huh? Then it dawned on me that the driver was possibly not loaded. I did some googling, and found out that you have to do a sudo modprobe floppy to load the driver before trying to mount it.

After I did that I was able to get all the files off the 3 disks and burned them onto CD. It was quite a trip down memory lane, I can't remember how many years it has been since I last used a floppy drive. Just the sound of the thing copying the files was almost foreign. And the speed, wow. We have become so used to USB flash drives. This was portable data back in the days.

mythtv and cifs (samba)

Due to some error in the linux NFS client, I had to use CIFS to mount the storage from FreeNAS on my mythbuntu box. This seems to have created a new issue, whereby recordings do not get deleted by the backend due to "Text file busy" errors.

Because my storage was eventually going to fill up, I wrote a script to delete the recordings from the database and filesystem, and scheduled it in cron. It only deletes recordings that have been watched and with autoexpire on older than 14 days, plus LiveTV recordings with autoexpire on older than 7 days.

The myth.find_orphans.pl script was in a .gz in the referenced directory, so I had to uncompress and chmod it.

mysql -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg -e "delete from recorded where autoexpire=1 and watched=1 and endtime < curdate() - 14;"
mysql -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg -e "delete from recorded where storagegroup='LiveTV' and autoexpire > 0 and endtime < curdate() - 7;"
/usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/myth.find_orphans.pl --dodelete

nVidia TV Out on mythbuntu

I finally put in the LAN cable from my study/lab/network centre to the lounge so the mediacentre was moved to its final location close to the tv. Next up was getting the TV out to work to my tv. I used this site to get it working. Initally I thought I only had only black and white output, and struggled for 2 hours to try to get it working. I even went to far as to buy an S-Video - RCA cable, because a lot of references I found pointed to the fact that the RCA output on nVidia cards sometimes does not work correctly.

Well, after putting the new cable in, it still gave the same black & white results, but I now it works, because I just tested it on the DVD player. I used xclock to test, and it turns out I tried an incorrect/ignored command line option. After using the correct option, I have color! As they say: if it takes longer than 5 minutes it is probably a stupid mistake.

Next up is configuring the TV output to be the default/only display, and getting the remote blaster and my MNet decoder talking.

Here are the portions I had to add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get TV output working.

Section "Device"
  Identifier     "Device_tv"
  Driver         "nvidia"
  VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
  BoardName      "GeForce2 MX 100/200"
  Option         "TVStandard" "PAL-I"
  Option         "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
  Option         "ConnectedMonitor" "TV"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier     "TV"
  HorizSync       30-50
  VertRefresh     50.0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
      Identifier "Screen_tv"
      Device "Device_tv"
      Monitor "TV"
      DefaultDepth 16
      Subsection "Display"
              Modes "720x576" "720x480"
      EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier     "Layout_tv"
  Screen      0  "Screen_tv" 0 0
  InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
  InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Adding more storage for mythbuntu (and other uses)

Since my mythbuntu box is old and does not have onboard SATA support, I deciced to build a storage server with new hardware and record from the mythbuntu box to an NFS share on the storage server.

The hardware of choice was an Intel Atom motherboard, D945GCLF2D, due to the low processing power required. It has a 1.6GHz dual core processor, but is very quiet due to no fan on the processor (although the chipset has one!). Since I don't want to have problems later on, and RAM is so cheap nowadays I decided to get the max 2GB that the board supports, even though it is a huge overkill.

For storage I got 2 500GB SATA drives, which is going to be used in a RAID mirroring configuration to provide some form of protection from failure. Since I don't have hardware RAID capability, I needed another disk to install the base OS on, because the RAID volume would not be available until after boot. I also wanted a cost effective (read cheap!) solution, so I opted to get a USB drive to install the base OS on, since the motherboard supports USB booting. This meant I did not have to get an optical drive, which was only going to be used once for installation.

The software of choice for the storage server is FreeNAS, a free Network Attached Storage server based on FreeBSD. It has software RAID capability, and can exposes the storage in lots of different ways. It can also notify you via email in case something goes wrong with your server, so you can really hide the box in a corner and almost forget about it. Administration is via a web interface once you have it up and running and connected to a network.

I installed the embedded image from the downloaded ISO onto a USB drive using physdiskwrite, booted the new box with it, configured the disks, and shared the RAID volume via NFS. The next step was mounting the NFS share from my mythbuntu box, which was trivial as well, I only had to install the nfs-common package.

Initially I had a stability issue on mythbuntu with the NFS share, it kept hanging up after a period of inactivity, but installing all available updates seems to have cured that problem, I'm happily watching a recording as I'm typing this.

Getting Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 IR Blaster to work

I'm ready to move to the next level, to be able to change the channels on my decoder using the IR blaster that comes with the PVR-150. This link will help you a lot: LIRC PVR-150 IR blaster support

I only had to download the firmware and put it into the /lib/firmware directory on mythbuntu, and configure the IR blaster in Mythbuntu Control Center. I still have to figure out which codeset to use, but at least the irsend makes the little led on the blaster flash now.

mythbuntu + Hauppauge PVR150 = win-win

I got a Hauppauge PVR 150 card today, installed it in place of the Genie Wonder Pro, configured it and the remote in the Muthbuntu Control Center, and it works out of the box! No editing of config files, no manual tricks, nada, niks!

It is brilliant when software and hardware gets this this level, especially on Linux.

Big thumbs up to the mythbuntu and mythtv guys, you rock!

mythbuntu 9.04 - 1, KnoppMyth 5.5 - 0

I dug an old Athlon 700 out of retirement, and fitted my Genie Wonder Pro TV card in it to see if I can get it working as a media centre.

First I tried KnoppMyth 5.5. Setup worked fine (after I replaced the faulty pc133 memory), but I could not get it to Watch TV, no matter what I tried. After a day or so of struggling, I gave up.

Next was mythbuntu 9.04. Setup went without a hitch, and I could Watch TV!!!! Then the struggle to get the Genie Wonder Pro audio working started. In case you have the same problem - just connect the audio line from the card to your motherboard's aux input and forget about getting btaudio working... I've set up some xmltv schedules, and have some recordings scheduled for the next few days. The machine only has 384mb RAM, so it swaps a bit between certain ops like MythTV setup and MythTV frontend. I'm looking to upgrade to an Intel Atom or such and a proper capture card like a Hauppage 150 soon.

All in all, I have hope for a Linux Media Centre after mythbuntu, they've done a good job in my opinion.