Recent Comments
Category Archives: Computers
Gentoo MythTV and Dvico DVB
OMG what a world of hurt I have put myself in.
I decided to upgrade my computer at home so I could play Battlefield 2 properly. So now I have a DFI Nforce 4 SLI motherboard with 2Gb of OCZ Ram, a AMD 3000 Venice core processor clocked up to 2339Mhz (above the default 1800Mhz) and a brand spanking 7800GT graphics card….hmmmmm
Expensive stuff. Anyway my old PC was now suitable for use as a PVR and I did have my old Windows XP system working well with the Dvico software and boring old Windows. It worked looked nice but user interface wise it wasn’t working very well with the TV.
So here come Linux. I have started learning Linux by installing Gentoo at work. It’s good for the task. I have an old P3 500Mhz machine I wanted as a LAMP server so I could run Cacti to monitor all the SNMP devices at the paper machine I work on. It works well and uses the hardware better than Windows 2000 did.
But Linux and digital TV. Damn its not easy. I started with Ubuntu thinking it would be quite easy. It was….kind of. Got it going quickly but it was frustrating how it was hiding things from me. I found it confusing partitioning the disks because I didn’t know how it was going to boot the system. So I mucked around a bit but it worked. Ubuntu started up into Gnome fine, more mucking around and I had TV out working…nice. Little more and the Wireless network was going. But to get the USB wireless keyboard to work….nah. Try to install Myth….nah. Stuff it, I’ll stick with what I know and at least compiling from source I can add patches as I need and not be afraid when I compile the kernel that it will be broken.
Enable SNMP performance monitoring on HP-UX
Log onto the operator station using telnet
Go to the /etc/rc.config.d directory:
cd /etc/rc.config.d
Edit the following files using vi:
- SnmpHpunix
- SnmpMaster
- SnmpMib2
Vi isn’t easy to use, I suggest you check out http://csep1.phy.ornl.gov/unix_guide/node13.html or http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html
In each file change the line:
SNMP_HPUNIX_START=0
to
SNMP_HPUNIX_START=1
Now start the Snmp daemon from the shell:
snmpd
It’s now working, check it is by either using top or:
ps -ef | grep snmpd
Installing Gentoo
Well I have decided to have a play with a Linux distribution. I chose
Gentoo because of the flexibility and the fact that it has a good user
support base.
I
have started using Gentoo for a LAMP based web server at work. I am
going to use Drupal as my CMS because of its flexibility and also ease
of use. Obviously I like Drupal (why else would my Blog use it)
One
thing I have found is that installing Gentoo is not as easy as I
expected. The main difficulty I had was with installing it at work
behind a firewall. I had the full installation CD, but I didn’t realise
I needed the packages as well…doh!
Anyway just for other
peoples info these are the steps I followed to get my first Gentoo
install going. I think it is still a bit broken but I will add bits as
I go. I am doing the same thing at home because I want to build a HTPC
and use Gentoo with MythTV, I know there are easier ways but I think I
will need some bleeding edge packages which won’t be included in the
"nice" distributions.