April 15, 2006
mitch @ 2:10 pm on April 15, 2006
After playing with a couple different versions of the linux kernel. I’ve found that I best resort back to the 2.6.13 kernel that had been working for me previously. I would have sooner but, with the new install and everything Gentoo 2006.0 doesn’t have the option for 2.6.13 anymore. Its not in portage anymore either… So, I ended up downloading the 2.6.13.5 kernel source from kernel.org. From there the ivtv in portage works just fine. So far so good.. Hopefully I won’t get anymore database corruption and no more chunks of recordings instead of one recording. 
Gentoo· MythTV — No Comments
November 10, 2005
mitch @ 7:22 pm on November 10, 2005
It may not be to interesting for others to read, but I really don’t feel like blogging about anything else. My mythtv box is comming along… the gentoo install is taking a while. I started from stage 2, and have optimized for the athlon processor, along the optimization -03 for speed with GCC. So, the compile time is taking a while. However, I think my kvm switchbox at work has stalled my progress on a couple times because of the scroll lock key. When hitting scroll lock on the key board it seems to halt the compile process. So, I probably had it sitting and doing nothing for the last day… I finished the move to stage 3 today, and I left it compiling my kernel (for the sake of time at work, I simply did a genkernel and made sure it had everything I needed as either modules or compiled in. I don’t much care if it takes it all night to compile). So, it should hopefully be done by the time I get back to work tomarrow. So I can start it on compiling everything for myth over the weekend. I got the video card today, so i’ll be taking that in tomarrow to be looked at. Should be fun.
Gentoo· Life· MythTV — No Comments
November 8, 2005
mitch @ 10:51 am on November 8, 2005
I’m finally starting my mythtv box build, I’m erecting it out of old parts I’ve had laying around, so far I’ve got a 15GB drive for my OS install, an AMD Duron 800, with 640MB RAM, which is a bit much for a myth box but, otherwise the ram will just sit. So… I figure why not right? couldn’t hurt. Anyway, when I first fired it up, the Orb heat sink i had on the proc was wicked loud, and we can’t have that in a home theater pc. So I bought a new heatsink from pcclub, which will do for now… I’m going to be slowly making it quieter as we go along, but that’ll really start happening with a new case. I’ll probably eventually replace the mobo/cpu with something else making sure its quiet, but that will be after the new case down the road a bit (or maybe for xmas ). After I replaced the cpu fan, the fan on the chipset (A7V133) was wicked loud too… finding a replacement and removing the old one was a problem, so I left on the heat sink… and I’m hoping that the CPU fan will keep the chipset cooler too. I’ll know soon enough, I’m starting my gentoo install today
Gentoo· MythTV — No Comments
November 5, 2005
mitch @ 5:27 pm on November 5, 2005
I’ve been running Fedora for a while now, both at home and on my work machine. Up untill Core 4, the repositories used for the extra packages that are not included with Fedora were excellent. However, both boxes I have, are getting quite messed up when updating… Its becomming extremely annoying. So annoying that I’m considering switching distro’s again. Possibly going back to Gentoo. With gentoo’s massive software collection, and having it at my fingertips ready to be compiled. If you remember I ran gentoo a year or so ago on my home machine for a while… untill some file system corruption that I blamed on my configuration of Gentoo. Had I known then it was because my harddrive was dieing I might not have been so hasty in making the switch. There were other things that made me make the switch as well however. Such as the Cisco VPN client. New developtments in software packages however, have added an option for vpnc. Which is an open source project that is compatible with the Cisco VPN concentrator we have at work. I still need to test it for myself to make sure I’m able to connect with it, but it will probably be the thing that allows me to go back to Gentoo. With Gentoo, using all the questionably legal software on linux becomes *MUCH* easier because they’re still in portage, and no third party repository is needed. So I won’t experience the problems I’ve had currently with Core 4. (Like I said before, using the same repositories now, as I did with core 3… and I never had these problems with core 3.) I’ll let you know how it goes.
Fedora· Gentoo· Linux — No Comments
January 28, 2005
mitch @ 10:07 am on January 28, 2005
I haven’t updated in a while because my home computer has been out of commission for a while… Not sure what happened… For some reason, both Gentoo, and Fedora have corrupted ext3 partions on my computer… Not sure if its because of the via_sata driver, hardware, or a combination of them. Any how, this last time, it corrupted my home partion and I had fsck running but it was taking *days* to run. I even stoped it and restarted it from a knoppix CD, and the fedora disk 1. They all took forever, and still didn’t seem like it fixed anything when they were done. So, I lost everything…. I hadn’t bought the Dual DVD/CD burner yet, so I didn’t have any backups… which is completely my fault. Anyhow, this time around I’m going with a different filesystem for my home partion. XFS is what I desided to go with. I did some research a while ago and looked into its benifits and it seems to have quite a few. Dispite not being officially supported by Fedora, I think it will be able to handle my 107GB partion better than ext3. ReiserFS would have been my other choice, but found on the fedorafaq site that SELinux won’t work on anything but ext3 and XFS. That sealed the deal, XFS it is. I’m currently loading it up right now, so far so good.
Fedora· Gentoo· Linux· News· Technology — No Comments
November 18, 2004
mitch @ 8:01 pm on November 18, 2004
Well, my wife could really use Windows for school… (some of the DVD’s and CD’s she has for studing only work on windows or mac…) so, I thought I could run VMWare which would also allow me to play some games online with guys from work. I attempted the install in Gentoo, and the installer asks for the /etc/rcX.d directories, and since gentoo doesn’t have them, i thought I could get away with creating some sym links to the directories they do have…. well, that ended up completly messing up my / partion…. So, instead of reloading Gentoo again and taking a couple days and then somehow maybe getting vmware to work. I desided to load Fedora Core 3. Since it was just release a week or so ago. I’ve been running it at work since the day it came out, and have really liked it. So I installed it and to my suprise I was able to load it in under 10 minutes. The SATA drives performance supprised me Anyway, loading VMWare from Core 3 so far has been cake. Just need to load an OS.
Fedora· Gentoo· Linux· Technology — No Comments
October 28, 2004
mitch @ 10:19 am on October 28, 2004
I finally got it back up and running last night… man… almost a whole week without it… (I started the rebuild sunday night) and maybe its just me… but it seems to be a bit snappier than it was before… Not sure if its because this time I went from a stage 2 install instead of the stage 3 I did before. Or it might be the fact I’ve only got one module loaded and everything else is compiled into the kernel with no intrd image…. Anyhow, I’m liking it. I got most of the applications I need installed, still working on the multimedia apps but those should only take me another couple hours to make sure they’re working correctly.
Gentoo· MythTV — No Comments
October 27, 2004
mitch @ 2:28 pm on October 27, 2004
It’s been about a year since I originally built my gentoo box at home. I’ve been getting a bunch of dependancy problems with the beta/testing ebuilds of epiphany which have been keeping me from being able to update the system. So instead of trying to figure out what it was doing and why, I opted to reload my / partition because I had just about filled it up anyway (had about 8GB of software in it… and I’ve NEVER had that much before…) so for the last couple days I’ve been building it. I would have been done in 1 and a half days however I ran into problems with my SATA controler again. Seems I removed something from the kernel config I shouldn’t have… I played with it for a day… then finally gave in and admited it was probably something I removed that was making it not work right. So, I removed my .config file and started from scratch, this time only enabling what I knew I needed and removing the floppy block device because I don’t have one. Recompiled and after playing with my root= options from grub, I was able to boot just fine. So last night I emerged gnome and supporting libs, and this morning I emerged evolution2. I should be ready to go when I get home now finally. I will just have to configure X again. (which is really easy) So I should be up and running in a couple of minutes when I get home. Then I’ll go back and lean up my kernel
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October 5, 2004
mitch @ 10:06 pm on October 5, 2004
I’m still trying to get mythtv setup on a friends box (an ITX Via C3-2 proc). I haven’t been spending a whole lot of time on it mind you, however, the problems I’m experiencing are more because of the hardware. (the C3-2) Its a little bit different in a couple of areas and I’m trying to make it as lean and fast as possible because speed is my main priority. With that, I’ve been using an -Os as one of my compile options, and I’m not sure if its because the proc is only a 1Ghz, or if compiling for size just takes that much longer. When I setup my main box i’m currently using (Athlon 2800+) I believe i had it up in about 3 days start to finish. Its probably because that computer is sitting on the floor and its unconfortable to sit down with it… I do have everything installed now I just need to do the configuring, so I’m hoping that won’t take long.
Gentoo· Linux· MythTV — No Comments
September 24, 2004
mitch @ 1:49 pm on September 24, 2004
A friend from work asked me to help him out with setting up his computer with MythTV on it. He bought an Via-ITX board and a 250GB hard drive, and I’ve been looking it a bit, and with Myth, speed is of the essence. So instead of trying to mess with KnoppMyth (which at the time seemed really good because it setup everything for you) however, with his PVR card he would have to recompile the kernel to get the ivytv driver. And if i’m going to be recompiling the kernel, and possibly other things… might as well make the optimizations for his VIA proc as well right? Anyway, all this and I’m came to the conclusion that Gentoo would probably much easier to maintain once it was setup, because of all this custom compiling I’d more than likely be doing anyway. So, thats what I’m doing. Started the Gentoo install last night, and I’ve created a 230GB partion for all his movie data. Formated it with JFS as it has the fastest delete times out of all the standard linux filesystems. And seems to be deamed “production ready” (not that I care that much… as Rieser has been production ready for a long time and just recently was given credit as such…) Anyway, I was thinking of starting with a stage 1 install of gentoo, however… had some problems, went with stage2, and I’m now stuck because automake depends on perl, and perl depends on automake…. So i’m not sure what I’m going to do… I might just go with a stage three and then recompile everything with my optimizations later… we’ll see. I’ll let you know how it goes… and hopefully once its up and running I can convice my wife that it would be nice to make one for ourselves after she sees this one in action.
Gentoo· MythTV· Open Source — No Comments
