Al Hoang

Can’t wait to get my hands on one (million) of them.

Very cool. Who says NetBSD is

dying?

Check the specs

at the bottom and you’ll see NetBSD listed..

Thanks Engadget

A little history…

I took another shot at getting mythtv setup again after trying it a few

years ago and lashing myself a few times trying to get the ivtv driver

patched into a mainline kernel. After a bit of work back then I got it

working but times changed and I ended up using the machine for different

purposes.

Installing MythTV again…

Once again, I’ve decided to take another shot at a mythtv installation.

This time I figured I’d piggyback onto a distribution that probably had

packages for it available. My choice was Ubuntu Dapper. So I did the

simple thing and tried:

sudo apt-get install mythtv

Trying to configure MythTV

And soon I had a mythtv installation almost setup. It seems that many

of the Japanese patches have been merged into mythtv (Wow!) so I didn’t

have to crawl all over the Japanese web space to figure out how to patch

in Japanese patches to obscure_utility (TM) just to get this working.

The first time I tried populating mythtv’s database with TV listing information

I got errors siilar to:

Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 3, after start byte 0xe7) at

/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Date/Manip.pm line 7167.

Since I’m not a perl god nor am I intimately familiar with mythtv or any

of its tools, I ended up searching on that error message and found a

post

on a Japanese board basically saying this would not be a major problem

with using mythtv in Japanese so I did what most people do… ignored it.

After I got the base configuration done, I realized I’d be spending a lot

of time not looking directly at this machine since it’s main job was to be

a backend recording machine rather than a frontend so I installed mythweb

to help me manage recordings:

sudo apt-get install mythweb

The Killer Problem settles in

This is where problems started coming in. After populating the TV listings

database, mythweb still failed to show ANY listings whatsoever. Needless

to say, this makes it a little hard to schedule watching anything.

After waiting a few days to see if this was just a transient problem

I still had no TV listings so I decided to search on it. What I found

basically was Mysql 5 changed a keyword ‘repeat’ to a reserved word which

OF COURSE mythtv relied on using in one of its tables. What this results

in is a non-working setup for viewing TV listings on mythtv. This problem

affects mythtv 0.18.x and the mythtv developers have basically said ‘upgrade’

if you want to fix it. However the Ubuntu Dapper packages stay steady at

0.18.x with a dependency on mysql-server which defaults to Mysql5. It seems

there are updated packages in Edgy (Why the f’ is it always in the NEXT

release rather than backported to THIS release????) but none for Dapper yet.

I hope someone backports these packages. In the meantime, I’ll try to see

if the updated packages build cleanly on Dapper for my own purposes.

References

• All bugs logged against mythtv in Ubuntu

• One bug logged against Ubuntu mythtv

• Ubuntu source packages for updated Mythtv (0.20)

• The REVU page for

  the MythTV package (A link on where to download all the source files for

  personal testing would be VERY helpful)

• Mythtv’s trouble ticket on this problem

• Installing Mythtv via SVN on Ubuntu (Not recommended since 0.20 of mythtv is

  alread released)

• Japanese instructions for setting up Myth TV

Here is one explanation why Google will eventually become evil…

companies are at different stages of a standard software business model, which goes like this:

1. build market share
2. lock in customers
3. profit from lock-in

Read it yourself

Check it out yourself

I built myself a Core 2 Duo system recently with the hopes of running

a much faster Linux setup than my old Athlon setup. However, what I ran

fast into were compatibility issues. It seems that the JMicron chipset

which is present in the MSI P965 Neo motherboard that I own is the culprit

of many problems

[1],

[2],

[3],

[4]

A workaround which is to install Gentoo (Ubuntu Dapper

folks does NOT work at this time) or some other distro besides

Ubuntu and make sure to

boot sending the kernel parameters all-generic-ide and

irqpoll to make sure that the kernel does not completely bork itself

on bootup. After that, you STILL have an issue with the Gigabit NIC that

is included onboard. And NO, it is NOT in 2.6.17.x kernels or less. In

fact you have to download the stupid thing from Realtek’s website (HELLO,

have we heard of merging into the kernel??) which can be found

here.

Just for note, the 2.6.17-suspend-r4 kernel that I used with Gentoo does

seem to cause some issues with the Realtek driver. I had to tweak some

settings in the header files for the Realtek driver to get it to compile

however I’m noticing that it is now causing OOPSes in ‘dmesg’ when I try

to load the driver. These OOPsies are causing issues since the NIC

refuses to come up during these problems.

Fixing it

Wait.. as usual for some patches to roll in. At the current moment it

seems that the fixes for the JMicron are in 2.6.18-mm or something branch

and will hopefully make it into the 2.6.18 release.

Glad to know in 2006, device driver issues still plague Linux. Perhaps

one day, everyone will just submit patches into the mainline kernel and

will eventually be synced up so people will just have ‘working’ drivers

for their desktops but perhaps that’s being too wishful