Media home status

My how time flies! Work takes its toll as well as personal life, so this blog is less updated than I'd like it to be. However, here's a brief status report of my digital home:

I am currently building a media PC based on a miniHFX chassis. The intention is to reduce the number of boxes under my TV from four to two. It will have a dual tuner card, it will use the motherboard audio and a graphic card with s-video out. The plan is to run Linux (Slackware probably) and MythTV.

I am slowly stringing cables through the pipes in my walls, so my D-link (and later the media PC instead) will have a fixed connection and then I will turn off the wireless of my D-link DI-624+ - yay! I also moved my desktop PC to the attic and since that is still my center for recording TV I needed to have an antenna outlet up there. Luckily the cable was already there so I just needed to connect it and it works beautifully apart from the fact that the desk is on the other side of the attic so I currently have a loose antenna cable lying on the floor. The move also meant that I need to string ethernet up there - but I use a wireless connection for now! It works fine and I currently have three tuners in my PC, and my new 800GB RAID-0 setup is really great for storing all the crap I intend to see at some point in time...

Oh, and speaking of D-link, I realised that I have bought lots of their stuff:

1. Access Point DWL-900AP+
2. Access Point DWL-2000AP+
3. Wireless router DI-624+
4. Wireless PC Card DWL-650+
5. Wireless PC Card DWL-G650+
6. Switch DES-1005D
7. Mediacenter DSM-320

Ok, so I've been reasonably happy with this stuff but it's worth noting that number 1, 4 and 6 all broke (although number 4 was possible to RMA, the rest were too old) so the failure rate is actually pretty high. In addition I've had TWO power adapters break with the router, one was RMA:ed and the other one broke just this weekend so I just decided to repurpose the adapter from the old broken DWL-900AP+.

I think I might change brand next time I buy some networking stuff.

Why I'm not using only Linux

There are many people blogging about whether Linux is ready for desktop use or not, and whether there is any need at all to use Windows. With this short piece I thought I'd list a few of the reasons why I don't use it exclusively.

1. It's not about OS installation, that's as easy as it can be for a lot of distros
   
2. It's not about any perceived difficulty to install software
3. It's not about not knowing what and how to do something

It's instead a lot about speed. A Linux distro is quicker to install and often has a much wider software selection (or you can compile it yourself). However, there is a lot of preparation required! You've got to read up on stuff, make sure things will work on your distro, possibly that all dependencies are satisfied, that supporting software is configured and running and so on and so forth. On Windows you install your software, sometimes you restart, and that's that.

Some say that the package repositories of many distributions are superior to finding and downloading some unknown installer from the net, but I have to say that just looking at the descriptions there it's impossible to know if you want to install a particular app, you will anyway wish to look at a web page with screen shots, documentation, FAQs and so on. From the actual install perspective the repositories are great, but from an information perspective they suck.

In short, with Windows you work less to get things working, with Linux you have more control, but you can spend aeons setting up stuff to work similarly to a Windows desktop if you're not happy with the defaults.

ivtv tuning problem workaround

Since my last post about problems testing if the ivtv drivers really work by finding a signal I have been thinking how to solve the problem. As the wiki states that you should avoid installing anything like mythtv since that might cause problems instead there should really be a way to scan for signals. I finally gave up and rebooted into my Windows XP installation and used "TuningAssistant.exe", which is part of GBPVR. It asks for your country and whether you receive your channels via air or cable of some sort and then scans the whole frequency band. Luckily it also displays the frequencies where signals are found so I wrote down the information and rebooted back to Linux and could then use

ivtv-tune -f196.250
cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg
ctrl-C

and then watch the clip in xine. Yay, I can see!


Now, on to Mythtv!