Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - gurumaia

Pages: [1]
1
Users / Appearing/Disappearing Hard Drives
« on: January 17, 2012, 04:25:22 pm »
I think I finally got enough information on this to open up a thread and see if I can get some help. Here's a description of the issue I'm encountering:
On any MD, when I go Media > Video, only 1 out of my 2 hard drives appear at any time. And they switch back and forth.

Let's go a bit more in-depth about my setup:
I'm running 0810 final.
I have 1 core and 1 MD.
All HDDs are plugged in to the core internally.
There are 2 hard drives configured on the system (apart from the OS hdd).
sdb1 - 2TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #46. This device's name is "2000"
sdc1 - 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive known as device #45. This device's name is "1500"

The system switches between them every 2 minutes.
I've tracked this down to the UpdateMedia execution. Every time UpdateMedia is run, they switch places (i.e. 1500 disappears and 2000 appears).
Here is an interesting excerpt of the UpdateMedia execution log during which 2000 appears and 1500 disappears. http://pastebin.com/b1feFdQQ
In it you can see that it tries to re-use PK_File 7875 for 2000. I can confirm that, prior to this execution, this same record on the File table of the pluto_media db referred to the 1500 symlink and that it got updated to refer to 2000, thus leaving 1500 out of the db.

Without knowing how UpdateMedia works (or perhaps some other lmce component I'm not aware of), I feel like there's not much else I can do to find out what's going on here. It seems that it gets the information (PK_File 7875) from some sort of id3 file but I don't know how that works.
If someone could enlighten me on how this stuff works, perhaps I can find out what's going on.

Thanks in advance!
ps. I know I talked to some people on the IRC channel about this before but time is really tight right now so I figure maybe the forum is a more appropriate tool this time.

2
Users / Torrent installation
« on: December 28, 2011, 12:52:16 pm »
Ok, so I finished my first (successful) core installation. I then added my first MD, ripped a DVD and was able to play it on the MD. All was fine and I thought to myself: Time to install a torrent client. Should be simple, I'll do it remotely from work tomorrow.
Well, simple it wasn't (or isn't). At least for me.
Let me put forth the requirements I have:
- Can't be any torrent client, must be one of the following: rTorrent, kTorrent, Transmission or Deluge. Also, no any version, each of them have to be a specific version.
- Must be able to administer remotely (from outside my network).
- Must be able to use rss (even if it is through an external rss downloader).

So after a bit of research I decided on trying Deluge. For this specific client, I need it to be one of the following versions: 1.2.3, 1.3.2 or 1.3.3.
I saw that the version available through the repos was 0.5.something so I knew I would either have to install it manually or add newer repos.
I decided to go with the latest, 1.3.3.

I first tried installing the .deb with dpkg but it would fail on some dependencies. I saw that there were a lot of dependencies and got lazy to install them one by one.
I then tried to compile it by hand (first installing the dependencies listed on the documentation) and everything besides building libtorrent went fine (something involving boost was not working). Since this is the backend, nothing worked.
Then, after a bit of researching, I found that the jaunty repos have the 1.3.3 version. I added it to my sources.list and tried to install it to no avail, it said some dependencies could not be installed. I tried to resolve these dependencies issues and was able to resolve all of them but the last one which was Python 2.6. I had Python 2.5 installed. I searched a bit about upgrading Python on the forums and wasn't able to find anything conclusive apart from a thread with no final information. So I decided to go ahead and try it.

This is where all hell broke loose.
First thing I noticed was it wanted to uninstall a lot of packages (about 15), wanted to install a bunch of new ones and upgrade some others. I figured the time to screw up my install is now, while I don't have it running at full speed. So I decided to go ahead.
I think my main mistake was I did it through Synaptic. Remotely, via SSH with X forwarding. On a 3G connection. I don't really know what happened but at some point near the end, everything froze. My connection dropped and I think Synaptic didn't finish its process.
When I got home, I went to check it and "apt-get update" would fail saying dpkg didn't finish successfully and that I should run "dpkg --configure -a".
Running "dpkg --configure -a" also didn't finish throwing out a core dump.
LinuxMCE seemed to be running fine and I was able to stream media to the MD perfectly. I could not go into kde on the core though.
I could try to resolve this but I would never know if everything was 100% ok. And I can't afford too much time to resolve this, so I decided to reinstall my core. This is where I'm at right now. I left it reinstalling at home (I'm at work right now) and will probably finish it up tonight.

Since this is giving me so much trouble, whenever I get this right, I'll try to make a guide of sorts and post it to the wiki. Perhaps this would help others.

But I also need some help. I'm not sure if I should attempt to upgrade python once again. Has anyone ever done it successfully? Does LinuxMCE use python for anything? I'm starting to think I should attempt to install rtorrent (which seems to have less dependencies), which would be my second choice after deluge.

Thanks!

3
I'm trying to successfully install my first LinuxMCE box. It's going to be a dedicated core.

I'm facing a few issues, mainly a grey screen that never goes away and virtual consoles not working (which doesn't help in resolving the grey screen problem).

Here is a rough timeline of events:
- Tried installing 810 Final from the DVD method, had no output to my TV via DVI (my GPU doesn't have VGA ports);
- Hooked up to an old CRT monitor, kubuntu install went fine;
- Had some issues with lmce install because I didn't realize I needed an internet connection even when using the DVD method;
- Finally installed it. Rebooted, went through AVWizard and encountered the issue reported in this thread: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php/topic,12083.0.html (with the only added detail that if I move the mouse even just a little bit during the grey screen with big white text, the text disappears and I get a grey screen of death);
- Figured I should try the internet method, went through all the steps just fine, same result. I then noticed that ctrl+alt+fX doesn't work, so I'm stuck in the grey screen without being able to revert to another VC and login to a shell;
- After about 5 reinstalls, the Kubuntu installation started to fail, even before having anything to do with LMCE. The install process went fine but on first boot I got some CRC errors and just wouldn't boot. I thought this was an issue with my hard drive;
- Used the seagate tools to check the drive and even though it freezed 3 times, on the 4th time it completed just fine. S.M.A.R.T. tests (both short and long) were also 100%, so I guess the hard drive is ok (it has been working for about 2 years with windows installed on it);
- Since the machine freezed during the tests, I thought I should check my RAM, and all tests were fine;
- Tried installing kubuntu 8.10 again. Machine freezed when creating the partitions;
- Tried booting into the kubuntu live cd, creating one big partition with fdisk and formating it as ext3 with mkfs.ext3 to see if would freeze. It completed just fine (thought I could see that it would be pause for about 1 minute at a time);
- Then tried installing kubuntu one more time. Install went fine but the most bizarre thing then happened. When I boot the machine, it goes into the kde login screen but keyboard and mouse doesn't work. Also tried booting into recovery mode, but the keyboard won't work there either. This has never happened before. They work prior to the OS bootup (BIOS, GRUB, etc) and work fine with the livecd;
- Tried reinstalling kubuntu 8.10 and left it working through the night. I'll see what happened tonight.

It looks like the grey screen trouble I've been having was fixed since then, so if can get kubuntu to install correctly, it should work out fine. Is it recommended to use the DVD method or the Internet method?
Also, I haven't found anyone that has the same VC problem as I do. It works fine under KDE and whenever I reboot the machine from the grey screen (using the reset button) and get to a shell login. The only time it doesn't work is on the grey screen.

Sorry for the long post, I'm running out of ideas here. Without a working keyboard, there doesn't seem like there's much I can do. If my last install didn't work, I'll try the DVD method again. And I'll try to find a ps2 keyboard to see if the problem is with the USB ports.

Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot about my machine specs. Here's what I remember, I'll dig up more info when I'm at home:
Gigabyte G31M Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo (don't remember which one)
Nvidia 8800GS
4GB RAM (probably Kingston sticks)
Seagate 500GB hard drive for the OS
A second encore NIC (10/100mbps)

Pages: [1]