DVD 710 Beta 4 Experience

[freymann]

After reading and making plans to try out LinuxMCE for the last month, I was able to spend the last 4 hours working on the installation on a new "core" system.

For this particular post, I'm not going to ask any questions (those are coming in separate posts) but rather give an outline of how the installation process went for me.

I bought some new equipment early Dec/07 which has been working super with Ubuntu 7.10.

-2 pieces crucial 1024MB PC5400 DDR2 667 Mhz Memory
-1 Intel Pentium D 925 Processor 3.0Ghz 4MB Cache, 800MHz FSB, Socket 775 Processor
-1 EVGA nForce 650i Ultra (T1 Version) Sockt 775 ATX Motherboard with Audio/PCI Express/Gigabit Lan/USB 2.0/Serial ATA
-1 EVGA GeForce 8400 GS Video Card, 256MB DDR2, PCI Express, DVI, VGA, TV Out Video Card
-1 Samsung SH-S183L SATA LightScribe Burner
-1 Seagate 250GB Serial ATA w/NCQ 7200/8MB/SATA-3G
Just a cheap case and 400 watt power supply, CPU fan.

To get ready for LinuxMCE I purchased a Gyro mouse and a Hauppage PVR-150-MCE. The Remote and blaster is coming. I purchased a second PVR 150 with remote and blaster for use in a machine upstairs.

I thought it would be good to have all the hardware installed before starting the install, so I installed the PVR-150 PCI card and I connected the Gyro mouse USB dongle. Powered up, inserted the DVD and off we went.

I'm using the component output cables and video appeared on my cheap wal-mart 26" LCD HD TV screen just fine. I had a VGA monitor connected up as well.

Try #1. First trip through everything was fine. I got to the reboot part, and after the reboot, some stuff on the screen and then a blank screen for a very long time. I'm using only 1 network card and I hadn't flipped off the DHCP server in my router yet, so I thought, heck, go with try #2.

Try #2. I've disabled DHCP in the router. Same thing. Get to the reboot thing, it reboots, some stuff flashes by on the screen, blank screen for a very long time.

Try #3. I decided to install a second PCI network card. I turned the router's DHCP server back on. I removed the Gyro Mouse USB Dongle. Fired it up. Interesting, this time the video is only to the VGA output. It reboots and after a while I get the setup wizard.

I walked through the wizard the best I could. When I was adding rooms it jumped ahead of me as if I was done so a few rooms were left out. I couldn't figure out how to activate the PVR-150 card or pretty well anything else. I did connect the Gyro mouse USB dongle and that was recognized fine. I was able to send the video out the component cables and am getting 720p  1280x720.

So now it's working, I pull out my Single NIC & Existing DHCPd text from the wiki and set about to make the necessary changes. After saving the changes to the network interfaces, things just appeared to freeze up so I powered down, removed the 2nd PCI NIC, rebooted. I believe the network stuff stuck, so I was off to edit /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf. The wiki instructions didn't match the text I was seeing so I winged it. Reset the core.

Went back and checked /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf and my changes were gone and I believe there were more lines in there before and my changes were gone again? (can't remember). So I edited it again and rebooted.

This was going better... but I can't ping outside and my DHCP clients are getting the wrong gateway. I do an ifconfig -a on the core and notice there's no gateway there either. I think re-editing /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf *again* corrected the DHCP clients. But there was one last file to edit manually on the core, and that was /etc/network/interfaces. I had to update the gateway IP number. Restart again.

Now I have external web access, my DHCP clients are working, and all is well.

So I go to the wiki and I read the section on manually adding the PVR-150-MCE. When the MythTV setup program loads, the edges of the screen all around are off the edges. Anything outside of the main LinuxMCE screen runs off the edges and makes it very difficult to navigate.

However, even worse, is the fact that the mouse (either one, the gyro or ps/2 mouse) doesn't work in the Myth screen. I can't make any drop-down selector do anything and most times it just 'finishes' without letting me do much of anything. I'm completely unable to watch TV through the PVR-150-MCE at all at this point.

LinuxMCE is finding some network shares and asking me about them while all this is going on too. That's no problem either. However, one thing is bugging me is my I/O Magic 500GB external USB drive, that was fully loaded with all my media, just sits there blinking after I powered it off, moved it 4 feet, and reconnected. That's a bummer as it gives me nothing to experiment with on LinuxMCE at the moment.

I signed up at schedules direct, activated. I entered my username and password into mythtv but I have no idea what that is doing for me since the mouse isn't working on the MythTV screens and keyboard control is tricky at best.

I inserted a DVD and it played the copyright stuff for a minute and then nothing. Hmmm.

So 4 hours later I have a working box with the LinuxMCE interface. No idea what UI it is set on. I have no TV. No DVD movie playback. And no way to configure MythTV.

I think that's all I'll be doing today. Tomorrow I have made free so I can continue to play, and Sat and Sun is open too. That's my initial experience. I'll post some specific questions later.

[colinjones]

Too much info here to respond to it all. But first, your network config isn't going to influence whether you get video at that point. Where you were up to isn't clear from your post - however, note that once you have installed and get to the AV wizard, video is only output through VGA, not component.

Read the Wiki on the AV Wizard - the number keys from 1-5 select the output. 6-0 the resolution, when you are in the AV Wizard. You should see your BIOS splash screen, then the Kubuntu splash screen, then hopefully a Kubuntu text-based console login prompt briefly (and will say Kernel alive down the bottom). Then the screen will flicker and go dead if you aren't plugged into the VGA port. Wait a few seconds, or at least until any significant hard drive activity stops. Then hit '2' - I think that is component - best to check the wiki first. You need to wait at least 15 seconds for X to shutdown, reconfigure, start back up, and start outputing to the new port during which time the screen will flicker. Once you are sure you have the right output, if there is still no picture then it is probably in a resolution the screen can't handle - defaults to 640x480. Now try keys 6-0... again you must wait at least 15 seconds between each key to ensure that it has settled down and isn't working....

[freymann]

Where you were up to isn't clear from your post - however, note that once you have installed and get to the AV wizard, video is only output through VGA, not component.

 The system was running on my 3rd try. I had a monitor on the VGA output all the while. On the reboots, I saw the Kubuntu splash screen, the text-based console login prompt briefly, then nothing. No sound either. Very strange.

Read the Wiki on the AV Wizard
[/qoute]

 I really don't think this is the issue. No sound, no video, nothing. For some reason, on the 3rd try, it was fine.

 I've been busy watching some tv shows via 'normal' inputs and now when I switch to LinuxMCE it won't even go to the UI anymore. Says something about regenerating the orbiter skin, then failed, then no response from the orbiter, so the whole thing is quite useless at the moment.

 I can get to the web admin page. I can SSH in. La la la.

 I'm feeling too hopeful about the whole thing at the moment.

[freymann]

Further to this attempted install (#3), other than MythTV not using the mouse, and the screen display running off the edges of all four sides of the screen while in kubuntu (but the screen size in LinuxMCE was perfect), things seemed to be working.

At one point, I connected by Dell Latitude D600 on the wired network and tried a network boot and it timed out and fell back to booting off the hard drive. I *think* that kill the orbiter on the core. As next time I flipped on the screen, it was complaining about rebuilding orbiters and failed, and I was stuck on the launch window or whatever that is.

I could still SSH into the box, the web admin page was responding, but now the core is completely useless to me.

For kicks this morning I net booted a very old Compaq P3-550 with 256mb of RAM. It went through most of the screens as best I can tell. I could see it was given a gateway of 192.168.0.2 (the core) but shouldn't it be given 192.168.0.1 (my Linksys Router)? I'm using a 1 network card config.

Oh well, I really didn't care as I planned to reinstall and start over from scratch, and I'll provide details of attempt #4 in a seperate thread.