Vacation

Ryan1 Comment on VacationMythTV, Phantasialand, Wii

Didn’t get around to posting last week since I was on vacation. So what did I do with a week full of free time? Well, first I went and bought a Wii. What can I say, I like interactive gaming 😉 The next two games on my wish list are “Zelda” and “No more Heroes”. Wii Sports is fun, but I need something with more “oompf”.

Then I finished up my MythTV computer. The PC has Wifi and normal LAN, but the LAN cable is only connected when I need to transfer large amounts of data (e.g. video files). It turned out Linux was a bit stupid out-of-the-box. Ethernet Interfaces are always UP, no matter if a cable is physically plugged in or not. And since by default all interfaces have the same routing metric I couldn’t connect to the box via Wifi unless I plugged a Ethernet cable in -duh-. So after some google digging I found two useful packages, ifplugd and ifmetric. The former pulls interfaces up/down depending on their physical state, the latter sets the routing metric, so now Wifi works the way I wanted it, and the PC automatically chooses the faster interface for communication.

Thursday and Friday we went to Phantasialand which was lots of fun. A few tips:
– Black Mamba: sit in the first row, it is definatly worth it.
– Colorado Adventure: sit in the last car
– Winja’s Fear (right side) is better than Winja’s Force
– Mystery castle is … fun 😉
– River Quest: you will get wet. the only “maybe” here is if you only get wet, or if you get soaked

MythTV Update

RyanMythTV

Ok, here are some helpful tips for using mythbuntu in Germany:

The built-in search for theaters/movies near you only works for the states. Anyone else on the world will want to download this script and fetch the information via Google (change the Google domain to something local to you in the source code)

If you want to get your EPG data via the Internet, have a look at this howto. It fetches the data very quickly compared to the usual parsing scripts of xmltv. I fill the EPG database via a cronjob as soon as there are less than 4 days of data for any channel. For anyone interested, here is the SQL to get the next date/time of “missing” data.
“SELECT MAX(starttime) AS time FROM program GROUP BY chanid ORDER BY time ASC LIMIT 1”

Anyone with a Marvell Libertas 8335 chipset wifi card is going to need the package ndiswarapper, and the windows 2000 drivers from here

The low profile graphics card works like a charm 😉
Here is my lspci if anyone is interested, or for people using google to find help

00:0a.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC15 MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1)

[htpc] Graphics card

RyanMythTV

I got my new graphics card for my htpc today. It’s a low profile, passive cooled geforce 6200 from XFX. I’ll stick it into the PC this weekend and see how mythbuntu copes with it. The card in there right now has a worn out fan and is making a LOT of noise, and a replacement fan (or passive heatsink for it) would have cost more than this new card.

Mythbuntu

RyanMythTV

Up till a few days ago I had a computer running Windows and TVedia in the living room (to record shows, time shift viewing, that kind of stuff). I finally got around to switching over to Linux and MythTv. The main reason I stuck to Windows for so long, was that I had a X-Card (hardware DivX and DVD decoder) for which there are no drivers for Linux. Well, I finally ripped that piece of hardware out of the PC, and am replacing it with a stock graphics card (passive heatsink) for video out.

Anyway, here are some of my experiences with MythTv to date. Installation was easy since I used a distribution pre built for MythTv (Mythbuntu). The concept of mythtv is to have a backend that records stuff, has the database with all the vids and so on; and a frontend with a nice gui that displays everything. Not that important for me right now since I have both running on the same PC (except that I had to wrap my mind around “what has to be configured where”). Lots of cute plugins, some useful (like the interface to audio and video streaming services like shoutcast, youtube, apple,…) some not so useful. I have a Hauppauge 350 as a video input device and needed some fiddling to get it up and running. Would have saved me about an hour if the default theme wouldn’t have chopped off the hint telling me NOT to enter a default channel. Took me about another hour or two to get EPG data automatically imported. On the other hand, the remote control worked like a charm, compared to Windows it was zero work to get that set up.

The first additional software I installed was phpmyadmin. Good lord the software stores everything in a mysql database and gives you no user friendly way to access it (mysqladmin ont the command line does not count as “user friendly”). And I fear it may take me a few more days to get my wireless lan up and running since the chipset is more or less not supported.

vmware for dummies

Ryanvmware

A few months ago I stumbled across Moka5. Moka5 is more or less nothing else than a nice frontend for the free version of vmware’s player and creator. Now you may ask “Why use 3rd party software when I could use the stuff from vmware?”. Good question, simple answer: moka5 is comfortable. It brings along a lot of functions that make working with vmware more comfortable. Import existing vmware images from the moka5 lab oder vmware’s virtual appliance marketplace. Make your own vmware session with a few mouseclicks. Package together your vmware to have a backup. Install moka5 on a usb stick/drive and take your virtual pc with you; moka5 will install the necessary vmware software on the host pc, and deinstall it when you are done. Right now I have a few images on my moka5 usb drive that I carry around with me. Ubuntu, Backtrack, a Windows installation for trying out software without it mucking up my system.

Definatly something to have a look at if you are on the search for a free and easy to use virtualization solution.