Doug Goldstein

So this week I took the plunge once I canceled my Xbox Live service and bought a modchip for my Xbox. I installed a X-Lite modchip and use the X-Chip EvoX BIOS along with Xbox Media Center and I’ve tried to install XBMC for MythTV. XBMCMythTV is a add-on written in python. I would love to try it and contribute some code back but SourceForge currently sucks.

I only got the Xbox modchip to install Linux and MythTV on the Xbox but leave functionality to play Xbox games intact. The reason for this was that I currently can’t get my PPC box to output anything to TV-out but even if I did I’d probably need to get a new card like an ATI Radeon 9550 but I’m too broke to afford it now.

Now I was going to install GentooX MCE (since I didn’t want to compile everything on) on my Xbox and contribute to getting Gentoo to work better on the Xbox but I found out I needed at least 20gb free which seemed a bit excessive. I only have the original Xbox HD in there which is an 8gb (I have the Xbox 1.0) and you need a seperate partition for Linux that has to be above the 8gb mark so that ruled out Linux
So I’m trying to use XBMCMythTV but like I said SourceForge sucks because something is wrong with their CVS server. XBMCMythTV for 0.19 is only available in CVS. I followed the basic instructions:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xbmcmythtv login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xbmcmythtv co -P xbmcmythtv

But it doesn’t grab all the code. Just random files are missing so it won’t work currently. I keep running “cvs up -dP” but it hasn’t fixed it. Re-checking out the sources doesn’t fix it either. No idea what’s going on.

Filed under: General, Linux, MythTV
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So I want to build my own MP3 player. Been thinking about it for a while and been thinking about some other functionality that I wish other mp3 players had built in…. like FM transmitter. And then I found this!

yampp

Minty MP3

I think both of these are pretty cool. Currently I’m leaning towards a yammp-7. Anyone have any experience with any of these?

Filed under: General, Linux
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So just before yesterday’s GatorLUG meeting I installed Hanno’s Xgl overlay and got Xgl up and running on my ATI Radeon Mobility 9000. It’s a r200 based card, specifically a R250Lf chip. Hanno’s instructions are for a windowed X server on top of your current X session, this didn’t work for me. So I followed Sebastian’s instructions but those weren’t without their oddities. Basically I messed up at first and didn’t realize that I had to restart my X session… I know… duh! But I wasn’t thinking, just rushing. The other HUGELY important issue is to make sure you run glxinfo first, which is provided by x11-apps/mesa-progs and make sure you have “direct rendering: yes” in the output, otherwise X will just crash on you. Well, here’s the steps to make it happen.

1. cd /usr/local

2. svn co http://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay

3. add “/usr/local/xgl-overlay” to PORTDIR_OVERLAY

4. emerge -auDv world

   # This will update mesa, cairo, and glitz.

5. emerge xgl compiz

   # This will install the OpenGL X server and the composition manager as well as Gnome Decorator

6. cd /usr/bin && rm X && ln -s Xgl X

   # This changes the X symlink to point to Xgl rather then Xorg. To switch back point it back to Xorg

7. Log Out
8. Log In
9. If you’re using binary drivers (nvidia and fglrx) prepend the following command with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/opengl/xorg-x11/lib/

10. compiz --replace gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher &

11. gnome-window-decorator &

12. And you’re all set. You should see some pretty neat effects.

Some things to keep in mind.

• This won’t work on KDE just yet because of the lack of kde-window-decorator. It’s being worked on but it’s not ready yet.
• It’s highly experimental code, it probably won’t work.
• In fact, binary ATI drivers are known not to work and open source nvidia drivers are known not to work. Only ones that do work are binary Nvidia and open source ATI and only with certain cards.
• Performance is pretty poor right now
• Anti-Aliased console fonts are busted (aka gnome-terminal)

Reason I provided instructions is that Sebastian’s instructions didn’t work for me too well. You’ll notice my compiz call is slightly different then his. With his when I clicked on the title bars I’d get compiz crashing and it’s say WNCK_IS_DESKTOP or something like that failed. I didn’t pay enough attention to it at the time.

oh and just so everyone knows THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED BY ANYONE!!! IF IT BREAKS YOUR SYSTEM!! IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT!! Do not rant in #gentoo or on bugzilla about this not working!!

Filed under: General, Linux, Modular X
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So I just saw a US Air Force (hooah!) ad on TV and the guy says “Damn it’s crashed again” and the kid leans in and says “Reboot with F8 and pick Safe Mode” and then he goes on to become an Air Force Airborne Ops Officer but it’s pretty obvious that they were talking about Windows there.

I just thought it was funny.

Filed under: General, Linux
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So I’m suppose to speak today at the local LUG called, GatorLUG, appropriately since most of the people involved either go to the University of Florida or work there. I’m suppose to speak about Gentoo and I haven’t a clue what to say and as such I haven’t prepared slides. Basically I feel like I can speak about a lot of topics and I’ll pretty much cover anything that everyone’s interested in. I’ll be brushing up on my eselect knowledge today thanks to this week’s Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. I might create some really rough slides without chunky good details, though I’d much rather connect my laptop to an overhead projector and show it off that way. We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under: General, Linux
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Thanks to everyone that tested out the SVN snapshots building up to the 0.19 release, you guys helped work out some potential bugs with the release. I’d just like to single kormoc out for all of his hard work testing each 0.19 SVN snapshot and helping me work through some issues with them.

Anew plugins is now available for MythTV. It is called MythFlix, which is an in MythTV manager for your NetFlix queue.

A new utility app called mythwelcome is now included. mythwelcome displays a basic screen for when mythfrontend is not running, for example if your system boots to record a show. Also, mythlcdserver which should make it easier to make MythTV work with your LCD screens.
The major changes in this release are:

• LiveTV rewritten to support saving buffered content while watching
• Signal Monitoring for DVB and pcHDTV recorders
• Ending times may be changed while recordings are in progress
• Playgroups allow for default playback options on recordings
• Channel changes can be made across tuners without changing tuners manually first
• New popup keyboard simplifies setup using remote
• Preview schedule changes when making adjustments to recording schedules
• Added ability to control MythFrontend through a telnet socket
• Closed captioning support on PVR-250/350 (but not 150/500) cards, DVB subtitles, and other cards supporting VBI information.
• New theme (MythCenter), new plugin (MythFlix), and new contributed programs (mythlcdserver, mythwelcome)
• Signficantly overhauled MythWeb, please read the README for details and installation instructions
• Added a basic internal DVD player, removing the need to use Xine or Mplayer

Filed under: General, Linux, MythTV
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I decided to check gnome-terminal and it’s speed, but it doesn’t look like I’m the first to notice this. I decided to do some testing. Below includes results from xterm, aterm, Eterm and gnome-terminal. Sorry KDE people, I don’t have qt or kdelibs installed, don’t wanna spend several hours compiling them just to test. I ran each term 5 times and ran a copy of the terminal on another desktop so loading the app from the harddrive is a non-factor. The command I ran was “time ${TERMINAL} -e ‘find /etc’”, depending on the terminal it needed or didn’t need ‘ marks.

Oh, gnome-terminal also made CPU usage of X spike way higher. But that could be because there wasn’t enough time to grab enough samples and really make the value spike up.

Filed under: General, Linux
10 Comments

Well after a couple of warm responses to my first post, Why The Linux Desktop Sucks, such as brix suggesting I be suppressed off the Planet and halcy0n saying I was just whining and not providing constructive criticism, which I’ll agree with, I’m going to follow it up.

First I want to thank Daniel Drake (dsd) for his ideas and suggestions. He got me to try out linux-2.6.16-rc2-git8, which by the time I’m writing this is replaced by git9, but I found that CPUFreq worked properly in that kernel. I was going to do the git split process and figure out what patch it was but Daniel hoped to it and came up with a patch. I applied it to my gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r4 kernel and sure enough CPUFreq started working again for me. I’m happy abou that.

I also want to thank Paul de Vrieze (pauldv) for some suggestions he e-mailed me and something he found wrong in my logs (I’ve since updated them with versions that match the configs). I’m going to be looking more into the stuff he suggested, like DRI issues, composite issues and Framebuffer usage.
I’d also like to thank all the readers who had constructive comments about suggestions with different governors, disabling composite, and tweaking ondemand to ignore nice settings. For anyone looking for ways to tweak and tinker with the “ondemand” governor read the comments to the previous post. They’re pretty good.

Filed under: General, Linux
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I’m going to start a multi-part series on my gripes with the Linux desktop and why after more then 5 years of using Linux as my primary desktop I’m actually considering the switch back to Windows as my primary desktop. My primary issue is functionality and speed and yes, I did start Gentoo’s Gentopia project to attempt to alleviate some of this frustration and bring a functional desktop to everyone. Why am I so upset? Because I feel that we’re taking steps backwards rather then forward. Even now as I type this blog entry I’m actually able to type faster then my screen will display the typed text. I really don’t think that is too much to ask of a system. For those that are interested about my system specs and config, please visit www.cardoe.com.

Now I’m sure many of you will just call me a troll and that’s fine. Another portion of you will just tell me that “This is open source, just grab the code and fix it yourself.” I, however, don’t feel that’s a valid arguement because I really don’t feel I should have to learn the source to every program and package out there and fix them. For example, CPUFreq, we’ve had the hardware technology for 4 years now and there are even programmers paid to make the software work on Linux. Why does it work on Windows and not on Linux? Are these programmers incompetent? Sure maybe I’m doing something wrong config wise but last I checked setting it to “ondemand” with a range from 600mhz to 1800mhz, it should step up when the system is under heavier load and response time drops (i.e. when I emerge).

No matter what I do, my system will stay locked at 600mhz when I use the ondemand governor. Now sure I can use the userspace governor and set it to whatever frequency I would like or I could even write a script to do this for me. But why should I have to when the code for this apparently already exists.

Filed under: General, Linux
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