The Super $500 MythTV Box!

I came across this on Digg today. This guy spent just under $500 on parts to build a MythTV box (Case and all) from scratch, and has provided a guide on how to install Gentoo onto it.

To me, having Gentoo on a MythTV box just makes sense. You can only compile what you know needs to be on there, thus eliminating all the crap running that is usually in binary distributions (I wussed out and went with Fedora on mine )

But not only do you get rid of the crap, but you also get cleaner binaries by compiling it yourself. Sure it takes longer, but too bad

I’m thinking about getting this, except possibly getting some of the stuff on eBay and using some parts I already have (for example, I have a TV Card already, and I may get a smaller hard drive). Who knows?

Super $500 Myth Project

The Coolest Penguin-Powered Car in the World!

Have you ever met someone so geeky that they want a computer wherever they go? I’m definately one of them, but I’m nothing compared to this guy. He actually has a Gentoo system set up for his car, the CarPC. It uses a customized MythTV frontend and a plethora of shell scripts to do what it can do. This is why we love Linux and Open Source so much – it is so customizable and versitile. It is simply not possible to get all these programs and scripts to sing together on Windows.

But this is the most awesome car in the world. He has it set up so he can watch DirecTV wherever he is! His CarPC has bluetooth functionality, so it is able to connect to his Cell Phone, which in turn gives the CarPC access to 500 KB/s functionality anywhere thanks to Verizon’s EVDO network. Through a few scripts and SSH access, he can connect to his MythTV backend server at home, change channels, and use VLC to stream live TV into his car – HOW COOL IS THAT?

My second favorite Penguin feature of this car is also equally cool. He has a USB GPS adapter and a WiFi card. What can you do with these working in conjunction? Plot WiFi Hotspots! His CarPC is constantly searching for WiFi hotspots. When it finds a new one, it uses GPS to plot it’s coordinates and then Google Maps API to publish them to the internet. What’s more, it even identifies which networks are locked and unlocked by a Green/Red indication. A good half of them are unlocked

What else can this car do?
Taken from his website:

• Listen to music
• Watch videos/movies
• Control audio with steering wheel control. Since the audio is fed into the HU with a P.I.E adapter, the steering wheel is my “master” volume control.
• View Pictures in a slideshow
• Sniff wireless networks and plot them with GPS – I’ve plotted the APs I’ve found, and integrated it with Google’s Map API
• Download and view local Weather info, including 3 day forcast and doplar radar
• Browse the web with Firefox
• Connect to my cell phone with bluetooth, and connect to Verizon’s EVDO network
• Stream DirecTV from my house.
• Remote start my car, and connect to it from inside my house. I can SSH in, and transfer files without even getting off my couch

(note: he can’t use the computer to start the car, he uses the dealer-installed remote start and then can connect to the computer)

The only thing it can’t do is turn by turn steering. There just isn’t software like that for Linux.

But what is the best part? The PC is hidden under the car seat, and the LCD display and controls for MythTV are very well hidden into the car. He also has a wireless keyboard and mouse to control it as well.

CarPC Site
WiFi Hotspots
MythTV Site

Another MythTV Update

As promised, I have tested MythTV without a DM or WM running. I did not attempt to watch live TV, but to watch a pre-recorded show. First of all, I was shocked to see how much space it takes up. On the website they say it is about two GB per hour, but for a one hour show, it took up 26 GB. Considering that I only have a 46 GB partition, this is taking up tons of space.

Anyway, playback started with some slight pausing here and there, but it picked up and I was actually able to watch it without interuption. Pretty cool. I just need to get the size issue worked out now and I may actually be able to record shows like this

MythTV Update

Well, I’ve learned something these past couple days. A 926 MHz Celeron (actually, overclocked from 600 MHz) is not as good as an 800 MHz P3.

I do have MythTV up and running, installing it was a breeze through apt-get, setting up the MySQL database was painless (thanks to the HOWTO). The MythTV configuration script wasn’t that easy to navigate through (since you can’t see the pointer and have to use the keyboard), but nontheless easy thanks to their GUI.

So I tried it out and… wow! A picture with sound (before, the only way I could get sound was by going into gnome-alsamixer and adjusting the “Aux” switch of the sound card), which was nice. But… 4 seconds later, pause for two seconds, then 4 seconds of play, pause… you get the picture. It’s better than 600 MHz (that was like 2 seconds, pause…) but definately not suitable for live tv viewing. That wasn’t my entire goal for this, because I want the system mainly to record shows. I used the guide (very nice guide) to find a show that I wanted and hit space (god I need a remote…). I told it to record that episode only, and I came back once it was over (with the GUI frontend closed). I opened it up, and went to recorded shows and, sure enough, there it was. Full description and everything, which is nice. I hit space to play it, and it was playing fine for the first few minutes, and then it started pausing.

At this point, I can only assume that it’s the fact that I’m running Gnome in the background that I’m having problems playing recorded video. Later tonight, I’m going to try it with no WM or DM running (ie – in ‘failsafe terminal’ mode) and report back on that.

More Fedora Fun

Remember yesterday when I said that I was going to use yum to update the system? I lied. I tried to use yum to update the whole system, and couldn’t. In the process I also learned why people generally prefer apt to yum – it’s so freakin slow! Apt took about 20 seconds to determine which packages need to be updated, removed, newly installed, etc. Yum took about 10 minutes to do that. It had to first download headers for the one site in my yum.conf file, and I believe it does this every time it installs something (someone please correct me if I’m wrong). It then checked which packages on the system needed to be updated (which didn’t take that long), and after that it found what dependencies each package needed, but it did that about 5 times. I got bored and left. I came back a few minutes later, only to see that it couldn’t update because it was missing about 15 dependencies, which apt didn’t seem to find.

Hmm… I still have a functional Fedora distribution, why not try the RedHat network program that I haven’t tried. I opened it up, and it downloaded all the updates it could find. I left about 3/4 into the downloading process and came back to find that it was done and could start installing. I hit next to begin, but halfway into the install process it rebooted again. GRR!

As I thought back to the dreadful days of Windows XP on this computer, I can now remember that this computer used to reboot at random times often! The only reason I could think of was the overclocking that I was doing (my CPU is actually 600 MHz, but overclocked to 900 MHz). I re-installed Fedora, this time with Gnome (and without KDE). I rebooted and disabled the overclocking.

When it booted into Fedora again, I tried the apt update. It updated thw whole system, but still left me without apt afterwards and a disfunctional rpm. I applied the fix to rpm (by installing a version of SELinux) and used yum to install apt again (with ‘yum install apt’ – kind of odd to type) and it worked

This time, since there’s no KDE, I don’t have the problem I did last time. I now have a fully updated Fedora system with apt and many repositories that only took 6 fresh installs to do.

I plan on doing what I origonaly intended to do and install MythTV tomorrow.

(BTW, this was posted in Fedora)

Adventures with Fedora Core 3

I’m trying to take an old computer that was sitting in my basement for the past year and turn it into a home entertainment center (hey, the TV card in it from 1998 has to be useful for something). Luckily, according to the MythTV site, 800 MHz is just enough to watch live TV, and this is 926 MHz.

I had previously tested it out with a few Live Distros (Mepis, Kanotix, and even LinspireLive!) and in all of them, the TV card worked with the module ‘bttv’ (although in Mepis, the sound card wasn’t detected for whatever reason).

With the Fedora/MythTV HOWTO being my best chance of getting this thing working, I downloaded and burned all 4 FC3 discs (since the HOWTO is in FC3, and I have heard some bad things about FC4).

Well, my first step (after installing) was to install the atrpms-kickstart package, which included apt and a configuration good to update all the packages in the system and to restore the proper version of apt. The first time I did it, all went well with the upgrade (even the new Kernel), although once I restarted to use the newer kernel, I quickly found that apt was gone (it was supposed to install the normal version, which it didn’t) and rpm kept giving me errors. I found a fix on RedHat’s Bugzilla, which involved installing a version of SElinux (even though that was disabled). Sure enough, that worked fine, but I still don’t have apt.

Rather than mess around with it some more, I did another clean install (except this time, since it has two hard drives, I did an LVM so I have an extra 6 gigs for recorded TV). This time I installed a little more, including OOo. The apt upgrade took twice as long since it had to download/install twice as much. This time, the computer rebooted in the middle of installing, and I still don’t know why.

I booted back up into Fedora, and the RPM command returned the error “Segmentation Fault”

I did a third clean install of Fedora, this time with less packages than I did the first time, and the apt upgrade went along much quicker, but once it was done I still didn’t have apt and had to apply the rpm fix. This time instead of doing another clean install, I decided to try out yum. I added the atrpm repository (or, as yum refers to it, ‘Repo’) to the yum.conf file. It seemed to work ok, so I tried to install synaptic. This actually worked and, as a bonus, installed apt in the process. So now I finally have apt, and even synaptic.

However, I quickly noticed dependency problems. I could not install any KDE application, because there was an issue with kdebase and kdeartwork (or whatever the proper name is). kdeartwork was too new for kdebase, so every time I tried installing a K application, it gave me that error.

*sigh* I will probably need to do a fourth clean install of it, except this time, I’m using yum for everything exept for installing MythTV itself (on the website, he says that it is easier to install MythTV using apt)

I wish there was an easy Debian/MythTV HOWTO out there…