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Messages - sambuca

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451
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: January 24, 2008, 09:35:24 am »
Chris,

This may well be the same problem I am having, but it appears it sometimes does work when resuming. I have not idea about when it works and when it don't. I was thinking that it may be dependent on the amount of time the MD has been suspended, but this is just a wild idea, I have no knowledge to support it.

Is this consistent with what you see? Or is the AppServer always dead when resuming, no matter how long it was suspended? Or perhaps it is completely random?

I might have time to look into it during the weekend. I will of course post if I discover anything.

sambuca

452
Installation issues / Re: Can't get TV stream in remote Media Director
« on: January 15, 2008, 07:32:11 pm »
Not sure if this is relevant, but I found a solution my similar problem. Seemed it was a problem with how the home folder was mounted on the MD. The recorded shows are stored in the /home/public folder.

I opened the /etc/fstab file on the MD in an editor, and found this line
Code: [Select]
//192.168.0.50/home /home cifs credentials=/usr/pluto/var/sambaCredentials.secret 1 1and changed it to this:
Code: [Select]
//192.168.0.50/home /home cifs iocharset=utf8,forcedirectio,credentials=/usr/pluto/var/sambaCredentials.secret 1 1
I added the forcedirectio option to the mount. This disables some caching which prevents MythTV from detecting that the recorded file has been written to. (MythTV Live tv is really just recording to a file, and directing the client to play this file)
(The iocharset=utf8 is not relevant here, but was needed for the MD to recognize files with non-ascii characters in the file name.)

You'll have to remount the folder (or reboot) to apply the new settings.

Again, not sure if this is the same problem you have, but I thought I should let you know how I solved my problem.

sambuca

453
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: January 08, 2008, 09:02:58 pm »
Hi all,

As promised before Christmas, I would post information about suspend to disk. I currently have a SATA HDD in my MD from before I started using LMCE, so I am using that as a swap partition (for suspend to disk). I plan on buying a CF card and CF/IDE adapter and test this, but I don't see any reason why this should not work as well. As far as I know, this will just be detected in the kernel as a normal IDE disk (or SATA, if you have a CF/SATA adapter).

Please note that I have been trying a few things before I ended up with this solution, so please tell me if something is not working, and I will try to figure out what I missed in the howto.

The information has been added to the wiki http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Suspend.

After using suspend for a while, I discovered some problems with playing music after resuming (did not try video or TV). It might be the same problem as you had, chrisbirkinshaw. I also restarted the X server, and all seemed to work again. Not sure why. Anyway, I suppose we need to inform the core about the MD suspending, so it knows that it needs to wake it if it needs to access the MD. Maybe the problem with audio/video is related to the fact that this happens without the core really knowing, and that it somehow messes things up in the Orbiter or Application server.

454
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: December 23, 2007, 11:57:00 pm »
BTW I had to create a script which killed and restarted the X server after wake from sleep:

Code: [Select]
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/hibernate-ram
/usr/pluto/bin/Stop_X.sh
/usr/pluto/bin/Start_X.sh
Hmm, I have not seen this behaviour on my system. How do you suspend? I switch to a console session before suspending, perhaps you suspend from within your X session? Not sure if this should matter, because I think the suspend script switches to a console session before suspending anyway.

Either way, you could create a script like the lirc module loading/unloading to stop and start your X server. This way, it will be taken care of automatically when hibernating. I suppose a LMCE implementation (from a  menu) would just call hibernate-ram or hibernate-disk, based on user choice. So making a script like this will make this transparent from a LMCE integration's point of view.

I also got hibernation (suspend to disk) to work. I'll do a write-up on this after Christmas, I guess the next days will be a bit busy..

Merry Christmas to all!  :)

455
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: December 22, 2007, 04:11:53 pm »
After playing with suspend to RAM a while, I found two things that needs some tweaking. Anyone else seen any problems ?

First, sometimes when I suspend the MD, it wakes up after only a few seconds. It seemed the network card was waking it up. So I changed the type of communication that would wake it up from "ug" to just "g": ethtool -s eth0 wol g
Now it just wakes up when receiving a magic packet.

The other thing is that the lirc_serial needs reloading after resuming. I added a section about this in the wiki. Not sure if all lirc modules need reloading, but at least the lirc_serial module needs it.

I dont know if the lirc stop and start stuff are the correct LMCE way of doing things wrt. configuration etc. Please let me know if I should do simething different.

I also did some more research on suspend to disk. It might be possible to re-try resuming from a suspended image at a later time in the boot process, when the requried disk drivers has been loaded. However, this means we need to do changes to the initramfs. I havent got that far yet, but I guess I will try it at some point. ("If it ain't broken, fix it till it is"  ;) ) I havent found any good guides on how to do this either..

456
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: December 21, 2007, 12:39:43 pm »
Yeah, having a suspend to USB as suggested would solve this problem and reduce power use further. btw anyone know what the saving would be compared to suspend to ram?


Happy to see you got suspend working.

When suspending to disk/USB, the system would go into the S4 power state as defined in the ACPI standard, which resembles the normal power-off mode, where only a small amount of power is used to allow various devices to power on the computer (keyboard, network, soft-power button etc..) So the difference between suspend to ram (S3) and to disk would be the power drawn by the memory refresh of S3.

This page has some information about power usage http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html of Dell PCs. Sleep (S3) uses 1-6W and poweroff (or S4) uses from 0.7 to 2.5W.

The ACPI standard and power modes are described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI

sambuca

457
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: December 20, 2007, 07:05:38 pm »
That's excellent work. Would you update the wiki with the instructions? If you could include a test for each major step in the process, that would be a great HowTo.
I added a page http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Suspend with the how to. I adjusted it a bit to make it more elegant. Now you just have to type hibernate-ram, and wol is automatically set up.

Can't you suspend to a USB Flash drive? FWIW, I'd love to see a Flash drive with bootable LMCE installed , so any PC can be booted as an LMCE MD, even across the Internet. Please keep us posted.
I suppose you could have bootable USB flash version of the LMCE kernel, that loads a suspended image also from the flash disk, but you might run into trouble with IP addresses if you resume the image from a different network or location. I'm not sure though, so it might work.

Would you create a feature request in Mantis, pointing at the work you've done getting "under the hood" working?
I will do that.

Since my last post, I did some research on suspend to disk, using a SATA hard drive installed in the MD. I did not manage to get it to resume after suspending, but I think I know why. The SATA disk requires a driver which is loaded as a module, and at the point where the kernel tries to load the resume image, it hasn't loaded that driver yet. A solution might be to install a IDE disk just for testing, or to rebuild the kernel.

I also found out that there are a few different programs which manages the suspend/resume process, and it seems that the standard LMCE kernel uses the swsusp program. I guess this means that the suspend to disk program used needs to match the one in the kernel.

I'll keep trying..
sambuca

458
Feature requests & roadmap / Re: hibernation would save a lot of time
« on: December 20, 2007, 11:10:53 am »
Hi all

I have been following this thread closely, as I like the idea of suspending the MD. (Personally, I will probably leave the core on all the time, and thus my focus is the MD)

My motivation is twofold:
1) the power saving as others have mentioned,
2) reducing start up time for the MDs (time from no power to lmce started)
Currently my MD network boots in about 2 minutes, perhaps not much, but if I am to convince my wife to use LMCE to play DVDs, it has to start more like a DVD player (in a matter of seconds, not minutes).

So, partly motivated by this thread, I started out, trying to suspend my MD. Currently I can suspend it to RAM (also called S3), and restart it by wake-on-lan or by pressing the power button. (it restarts in  about 3-4 seconds  :D )

Here's how:
On the MD;
Make sure uswsusp is installed (I installed both hibernate and uswsusp)
See http://en.opensuse.org/S2ram for more information how to set this up.
If you are using a nVidia card read this; http://en.opensuse.org/NVidia_Suspend_HOWTO on how to suspend with nvidia. In short, add Option "NvAGP" "1" to the device section of xorg.conf and make sure no *vendor* agp modules are loaded (but agpgart is OK).
Then I run:
    ethtool -s eth0 wol ug
    s2ram -f
and my MD suspends to RAM. The above is what my MD needed, you might not have to use the -f (force) flag on s2ram if your hardware is recognized as supported by s2ram. I needed to enable wake-on-lan with the ethtool command, as it would not wake on lan if not. (probably LMCE sets this up when shutting down).

As always, the whole suspend thing is very dependent on the hardware you have, so you may not be this lucky. Also make sure your BIOS power setting are correctly set up for suspend to ram.
(My hardware is a MSI mainboard with SIS961 chipset, a Realtek 8169 network card and a nvidia Geforce4 MX 440)

My next idea is to try to have the MD suspend to a flash disk ,to keep the MD as silent as possible and reduce the power use even more. But I have to buy a flash disk and CF to IDE adapter first.

What I would like now is to have the suspend options available from within LMCE. The power menu would be a good place to put something like this. But I also like the idea of having the power button on the remote suspend it. After pressing the power button, the user should get a confirmation question and an option to choose which suspend (ram/disk) he/she would like. Unfortunately, I have not got the slightest idea of how to add such a menu option. I hope someone else takes the challenge  ;)

Anyone have any data on the power usage in full-power vs. suspend to ram vs. suspend to disk vs. power-off ?

sambuca

459
Users / Re: ogg vorbis
« on: November 26, 2007, 10:22:25 am »
LMCE does not currently read OGG or FLAC tags. http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2305.msg14574#msg14574

There are also other issues with ogg and flac files. It is mentioned here http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2362.0 that there will be some update for this in LMCE 710, so I guess you'll have to wait for the next release.

sambuca

460
Installation issues / Re: Tv cards
« on: November 21, 2007, 04:17:51 pm »

This poses some problems... I'm pretty certain that the Myth that ships with lmce-0704 will not work "out of the box" with DVB-T trasnmissions in H264 (I might be wrong about that though).

We are working with the lmce-0710 Dev team to add VDR to 0710 as we speak but as it stands VDR does not support H264 encoding without the use of a plugin and that plugin will not be in the initial 0710 release. Its possible that is could be added later but I cant say how soon that would be at present.

This is my understanding also. When I tested DVB-T, I did not use MythTV (had some problems with identifying the HVR-4000 card, but it was some time ago so I don't remember exactly...). (I used the dvb-utils programs: dvbscan, dvbsnoop, dvbstream)

Part of the problem is that the h264 is not identified in the received stream as a video stream, instead it is marked as "other" (I'm located in Norway, don't know if this is true for NZ). So the scan utility does not correctly identify the streams carrying the video(or the audio for that matter). I suppose MythTV/VDR/other tools might be the same. To get anything at all, I had to manually find the correct stream PID's and add them to the tzap/channes.conf file.


461
Installation issues / Re: Tv cards
« on: November 21, 2007, 03:20:03 pm »
I own a HVR4000 myself, and it is not detected by the kernel used in LinuxMCE. The HVR3000 will probably be detected, but I am not sure if it works. See http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-3000 and http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-HVR-4000 for more information about the status of these drivers.

I have been able to get something from the DVB-T part of the 4000 by using the 3000 drivers, but because of the codec issue (see below), I am not sure if it works, though.

Also, if you are trying to receive DVB-T, I have seen some mentioning about the encoding used in NZ not being supported by mediaplayers (yet). (As here in Norway, NZ uses h264 with PAFF encoding, or something like that, whatever that means...  ??? )

See http://www.mythtv.co.nz/mythtv/ for more information about DVB-T in NZ.

462
Installation issues / Re: Can't get TV stream in remote Media Director
« on: November 16, 2007, 10:35:37 am »
Hi,

I also have a similar problem. I have a PVR-150 installed in my core, and a few media directors that are PXE booted. When choosing live tv on the MDs, I only see a black screen and no sound.

However, if I after a few seconds of black screen in Live TV, try to change the channel, the live tv starts. Changing channels now works fine, both picture and sound is fine, until I stop Live TV. The next time I start live tv, I again have to change channel before any picture and sound appear. (although this does not work 100% of the time)

I did try to look into the problem, but my first experience with MythTV has been with LinuxMCE, so I'm no expert, and wasn't able to figure anything out.  I am not at home at the moment, so I cannot access the logs to see if they match yours.

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