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.

So after wasting most of one day I spent the next installing Gentoo. The compiling. Then emerging things and finding I need to recompile again. Then I find that things aren’t quite that easy for the RT2500 wireless cards….they bloody don’t work on boot for some reason. It works after startup, but during the boot sequence it doesn’t. Damn. Still working on that.

Anyway I still have other stuff to talk about but maybe I will post that next time. Hopefully I will have some more solutions and less problems.

 

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