... actually more than a problem, and I'll try do describe them in proper order.
Automatic upgrade process from .29 to .30 did not complete succesfully on my box.
The procedure was hanging when trying to upgrade slapd to newer version.
I rebooted several times, I also leaved it working overnight, but no result.
I then tried to workaround the problem by manually removing slapd, and this seemed to do the trick (at least upgrade was able to continue).
Unfortunately when upgrade finished OnScreen Orbiter on my hybrid was no more started (only X and maybe ratpoison were started), all I got was a grey screen and all network connection were dropped. No way to interact with the box other than hit "reset" button on the case.
I made several reboot but the result was always the same.
So I decided to go for a fresh install. Actually not a totally fresh one, as I decided not to reformat /home partition. As I've read that recent releases of Kick Start CD had some issues, I used .26 KickStartCD that I know that it's working fine.
Installation went ok (I only had to manually move old pluto log dir)
I noticed that apt-get is giving me the following warning:
Quote
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://deb.plutohome.com 20dev/contrib Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/deb.plutohome.com_debian_dists_20dev_contrib_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
but I didn't get any dependecies error so far so I guess it is not a major problem.
Nevertheless everytime I reboot the hybrid (and it happened quite a lot of times in the last 2 days) apt-get is getting some packages (e2fs related).
Now OnScreenOrbiter is showing fine, but xine is hanging the whole system each and every time I try to play a divx file. Looks like a xfree86 problem that in this situation jumps to 98% CPU, but I may be wrong.
My box is a VIA EPIA M10000 with a Nehemiah 1Ghz CPU, and according to what I was reading in this forum during the past weeks .30 release should have better support for this kind of hardware.
I'm surely missing something, but so far it seems to me that support for VIA EPIA hw is the same as previous releases.
I also gave a look on the Installation Wizard to see whether some additional settings may have been added to manage VIA hw, but I didn't notice anything.
With previous Pluto releases I was experiencing exactly the same problem, and the only way to make things working was to "hack" the system by using unichrome version of xfree86 and xine 1.1.0
At this point I'm totally clueless, and before re-hacking my system I would like to know whether I can do someting to make it work properly without altering the actual packages.
TIA
Marco
wow .... zero replies in one week ... :shock:
Are my questions really so dumb?
Regards
Marco
Marco,
I have major issues with .30 release also although I am on standard hardware. After the automatic upgrade from .29 to .30 things I was also seeing the same errors as yourself.
I decided to do a clean install with the latest kickstart iso and now my system is unable to the play any video media, playing audio cd's is totally intermittent.
I can only assume that .30 is really broken and hope that a new release is forthcomming soon :cry:
NOS
Hi NOS and thanks for your reply.
At least now I know that I was not the only one with this kind of problems ...
On other threads of this forum I've read that .31 is expected within few days, and probably this is the reason why Pluto guys didn't have time to give some hints.
I've read that something went wrong with Asterisk and MythTv, the same fate may have hit other packages although I didn't read any other issue report like mine (and now yours).
Moreover I've read that .31 KickStart will be much different. It will allow to set up a basic box without internet connection, and probably much more.
So I'm also eagger to upgrade to .31, hoping that it will clear these issues.
Of course, any comment by Pluto guys are always welcome :wink:
Regards
Marco
Quote from: "MarcoZan"I then tried to workaround the problem by manually removing slapd, and this seemed to do the trick (at least upgrade was able to continue).
We found out about it. Haven't found out why slapd gave problems, but it's being removed after these incidents.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Unfortunately when upgrade finished OnScreen Orbiter on my hybrid was no more started (only X and maybe ratpoison were started), all I got was a grey screen and all network connection were dropped. No way to interact with the box other than hit "reset" button on the case.
Weird. Unless there was a library mismatch, it shouldn't have caused problems. The logs would have had some ideas.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"I noticed that apt-get is giving me the following warning:
Quote
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://deb.plutohome.com 20dev/contrib Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/deb.plutohome.com_debian_dists_20dev_contrib_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
but I didn't get any dependecies error so far so I guess it is not a major problem.
That's harmless. Probably a logic flaw on our side adds that apt source. It's annoying, but it can be ignored.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Nevertheless everytime I reboot the hybrid (and it happened quite a lot of times in the last 2 days) apt-get is getting some packages (e2fs related).
That's a pre-upgrade for the MDs so they can actually boot when you upgrade from .29 to .30. I added some code in SVN to not download those anymore unless needed.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Now OnScreenOrbiter is showing fine, but xine is hanging the whole system each and every time I try to play a divx file. Looks like a xfree86 problem that in this situation jumps to 98% CPU, but I may be wrong.
My box is a VIA EPIA M10000 with a Nehemiah 1Ghz CPU, and according to what I was reading in this forum during the past weeks .30 release should have better support for this kind of hardware.
I'm surely missing something, but so far it seems to me that support for VIA EPIA hw is the same as previous releases.
As far as I know, nothing was added regarding EPIA. Rob (Tinia) has some EPIA machines at home and he may want to try adding the VIA drivers for them and tell us the (success) story.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"With previous Pluto releases I was experiencing exactly the same problem, and the only way to make things working was to "hack" the system by using unichrome version of xfree86 and xine 1.1.0
Please tell us about it, in detail.
One question though: what is in Xine 1.1.0 that you need to install it instead of the default (1.0.2)?
Quote from: "MarcoZan"At this point I'm totally clueless, and before re-hacking my system I would like to know whether I can do someting to make it work properly without altering the actual packages.
You'll still have to hack your system. Write down what you do and write it on the forums. If there is any optimisation that needs to be done, we'll have a base to start from. If it doesn't break to much stuff it may even get into Pluto soon.
PS. Sorry for not giving you an answer before.
Quote from: "NOSILLA99"Marco,
I have major issues with .30 release also although I am on standard hardware. After the automatic upgrade from .29 to .30 things I was also seeing the same errors as yourself.
I decided to do a clean install with the latest kickstart iso and now my system is unable to the play any video media, playing audio cd's is totally intermittent.
I can only assume that .30 is really broken and hope that a new release is forthcomming soon :cry:
NOS
What is your hardware? How does it behave? Describe "intermittent". Give as many details as you can. Thanks.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"On other threads of this forum I've read that .31 is expected within few days, and probably this is the reason why Pluto guys didn't have time to give some hints.
It's going to take a little longer. Have to do a lot of isolation of packages for the new CD, probably lots of tweaking too, since the initial idea was to tie the user to the Internet and we have to change all that.
Quote from: "MarcoZan"I've read that something went wrong with Asterisk and MythTv, the same fate may have hit other packages although I didn't read any other issue report like mine (and now yours).
This is new to me. I know MythTV has issues and was pushed back, but what happened with Asterisk?
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Moreover I've read that .31 KickStart will be much different. It will allow to set up a basic box without internet connection, and probably much more.
That's the intention. Still have to do all the isolation and tweaking I was talking above...
Quote from: "radu.c"I know MythTV has issues and was pushed back ...
What do you mean it was pushed back? Are you using an older version in the .30 pluto release now? If so I will download it and try again.
Is there a way to download and use .29?
Quote from: "paulsperch"Quote from: "radu.c"I know MythTV has issues and was pushed back ...
What do you mean it was pushed back? Are you using an older version in the .30 pluto release now? If so I will download it and try again.
Is there a way to download and use .29?
No, it's same version as in .29. It's pushed back on the schedule. All I know is that it has issues. Can't extend that idea. I just overheared some talks about "having issues" :)
Quote from: "NOSILLA99"I decided to do a clean install with the latest kickstart iso and now my system is unable to the play any video media, playing audio cd's is totally intermittent.
I found this thread on a Debian list by means of Google: http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2005/08/msg00326.html. I'd love some more reports on this (success stories based on applying what is said in there, if possible).
Ok, I'll go 1st with a success story:
I didn't change the initrd (wasn't that necessary), but only /etc/modules and added piix on top of the other modules so it loads before ide-generic. Now I have DMA on that machine's DVD unit.
Quote from: "radu.c"
Quote from: "MarcoZan"I've read that something went wrong with Asterisk and MythTv, the same fate may have hit other packages although I didn't read any other issue report like mine (and now yours).
This is new to me. I know MythTV has issues and was pushed back, but what happened with Asterisk?
I wouldn't have started a fire here ... I just recall a post where a user was saying that with .30 something related to Asterisk was not properly loaded. I think that on startup asterisk and its modules are unloaded and have to be loaded by hand. I test by myself because on my box I didn't start yet using asterisk, this is just what I've read about. I didn't mean to blame anyone's work here, and if someone felt offended please accept my apologies.
Quote from: "radu.c"
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Unfortunately when upgrade finished OnScreen Orbiter on my hybrid was no more started (only X and maybe ratpoison were started), all I got was a grey screen and all network connection were dropped. No way to interact with the box other than hit "reset" button on the case.
Weird. Unless there was a library mismatch, it shouldn't have caused problems. The logs would have had some ideas.
Logs related to old installation are still availalbe, as with the new install I didn't re-format /home partition. Just tell me what are the files you need to look at, and I will email them to you.
Quote from: "radu.c"
Quote from: "MarcoZan"
With previous Pluto releases I was experiencing exactly the same problem, and the only way to make things working was to "hack" the system by using unichrome version of xfree86 and xine 1.1.0
Please tell us about it, in detail.
I sent you an email with a resume of what I've made and some links pointing to modified debian packages.
Some of them are unapplicable with Pluto (I also tried Xorg, and via drivers compiled against an EPIA modified Xorg tree)
Keeping a "Pluto oriented" point of view in the end it turned out that on my hardware I have to use an EPIA modified version of xfree86 and libxvmc (to be able to use hw acceleration with xine), together with xine 1.1.0.
All these packages can be found here -> http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaweh/debian/
Of course an EPIA customized kernel would also help, but with Pluto .29 things were working fine also with standard kernel.
EPIA customized kernel would also mean a full rebuild of all modules, that may be a little tricky during a first time install and surely out of reach for most of average users, not to mention when a version update comes ...
Quote from: "radu.c"
One question though: what is in Xine 1.1.0 that you need to install it instead of the default (1.0.2)?
That's a good question. Using xine 1.1.0 has been a trial among others that I made, and I don't know exactly the reason why it is working.
I've downloaded the sources and I compiled only the engine part (not the gui)
The result was that Pluto .29 was working fine and divx playback was ok (with just a little adjustment on xine.conf parameters), i.e. xine wrapper didn't show any problem and playback was fluent.
My guess is that with xine 1.1.0 all in/out plugins are installed, while with 1.0.2 version shipped with pluto they seem missing. At least I noticed that if I run xine-check utility (pluto xine release) I'm getting a warning related to missing plugins, after installing xine 1.1.0 warning disappears
Moreover I guess that in 1.1.0 a better xv support for EPIA hardware is included.
Important noteThe "hack" of changing xfree86 server and xine version was working with .29, but it is no more working with .30.
Xine is not hanging the system, nevertheless it has poor performances (frame dropping, audio/video out-of-sync). Again my guess is that xfree86 server/drivers are ok, but xine wrapper is not using my compiled version of xine.
I will make further tests and will post here in case I find a (success) story.
Regards
Marco
Quote from: "MarcoZan"
....
I will make further tests and will post here in case I find a (success) story.
Regards
Marco
Hi,
let me just express that I'm looking forward to any solution that will give us Epia mobos working properly under Pluto...
Will this solution be for CLE266 or CN400 based boards (or if there is a god - for both ?
Regards,
Rob.
Hi Rob
my mobo has CLE266 chipset, so I'm focused on this target.
On unichrome project site ( http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/ ) you'll find that X driver they provide supports CLE266 and and KM400/KN400. Support for K8M800 and PM800/CN400 is still limited, but as I don't have those chipsets I can't say exactly how "limited" it is.
If this can help, I confirm that with .29 Pluto was working fine with some not-so-heavy tweak. I'm trying to figure out how to make it working also with .30. Im' always talking about an hybrid, so things may differ a little bit for MDs.
I think (but I may be wrong) that in .30 Pluto guys changed a bit some installation directories, so when in particular I compile and install xine 1.1.0 the engine will be installed in a different directory and will not overwrite the previous xine 1.0.2.
I'm playing with makefiles in order to have xine 1.1.0 installed on top of previous version, and when I'm done I will let you know.
Regards
Marco
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Hi Rob
my mobo has CLE266 chipset, so I'm focused on this target.
On unichrome project site ( http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/ ) you'll find that X driver they provide supports CLE266 and and KM400/KN400. Support for K8M800 and PM800/CN400 is still limited, but as I don't have those chipsets I can't say exactly how "limited" it is.
....
Regards
Marco
Hi,
you probably know about this, but there seems quite some drivers from Via released on their page with newer dates....
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=15&CatID=1810&SubCatID=101
I haven't been working on Epias since my first 9000a and binary drivers from VIA, so I don't know much about unichrome project or VIA attitude towards releasing drivers for their chipsets.
I'd be happy to test on cn400, just let me know when it will be ready...
HTH,
regards,
Rob.
Hi Rob
actually that one was my first choice when I started to work with EPIA hw, but I downloaded many different drivers without success. They distribute binary only for Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat and Suse and I was not able to find a proper way to compile their source under Debian. Also there is a bit of a mess with X driver and frame buffer driver, and probably I have first to make myself a clear picture of what is really needed.
Moreover there are some issues regarding VIA drivers licence, that seems to be not so "open source".
In addition to this the maximum performances with acceleration can only be obtained by using a forked version of xine (VeXP), that is out of Pluto perspective.
As soon as I get a stable situation with my current choice (and I think I'm pretty close to it) I may give again a look on their drivers, because they already implemented MPEG-4 hw acceleration that unichrome project still does not have.
Of course any suggestion is warmly welcome.
Regards
Marco
Thought I would post some good news.
Following the problems I had with mythtv and intermittent playing of media where CD/DVD's would sometimes start and sometimes not :? I have rebuilt the system again from scratch and also replaced the video card with a newer Radeon model and everything is now stable.
I can only assume that my video card was causing the majority of problems, although everything was working prior to the .30 upgrade.
I was also the person who reported a problem with asterisk and bttv unloading due to the alsa-noninteractive script. This is not a real issue as it is was easy to resolve and came about as I have an intel8x0 onboard sound card.
Anyway it is great to have a pluto system back up and running following problems with yttron being offline which just happened to co-incide with an attempted rebuild at the weekend.
NOS
Quote from: "MarcoZan"Hi Rob
....
Of course any suggestion is warmly welcome.
Regards
Marco
Hi,
I'm not sure if this will be of any help, but I found these interesting links :
http://www.epiawiki.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=EpiaXfree
with link to Ivor's version (it seems newer):
http://myth.ivor.org/unichrome/
Explanation on some forum:
QuoteThe issue is that the project is fragmented now, where the sourceforge project appears to be pretty much abandoned, but some developers continued with another branch (the main guy being "Ivor"), which supports the newer chipsets, like the CN400.
I bet that Ivor Hewitt (author of unichrome active fork) will help you on that matter. Good luck, we keep our fingers crossed...
Regards,
Rob.
[/url]
Hi Rob and thanks for your support
Initially I also gave a look on Ivor snapshot but it was not compiling with the X tree I had at that time. This does not mean that the solution is not good, because in the very beginning I had several problems in compiling anything on this box ... Now it may be worth a new try ...
In general all of the different alternatives I've found are related to Xorg or to "cutting edge" Xfree86 releases, that is a bit far from keeping the things close to Pluto path.
One of the approach I had (maybe a bit extreme ...) was to build my box from scratch with debian kernel 2.6.12 EPIA patched and DRI enabled, replace Xfree86 with Xorg EPIA patched and compile X driver. Then my idea was to install Pluto on top of it, with all sources in order to be able to rebuild all needed modules. Unfortunately it came out in the end that Pluto installation wizard does not support anymore custom installations like this .... so pity because the box was working like a charm with Xine ...
So I had to revert to a more standard approach, and this is why I'm making now some more conservative choices (of course besides to a bit of lack of overall knowledge of linux and Pluto..).
Basically I don't know what kind of impact may have against the Pluto system the choice to replace Xfree86 with Xorg, or simply upgrade Xfree86 to a 4.5.x release (4.5.x has native VIA EPIA support, currently Pluto uses a 4.3.x that has to be patched). Any suggestion/comment on this topic is greatly appreciated, I wouldn't mind to save some time on potentially unuseful tests :)
What I can surely say is that all these performance problems would instantly disappear the minute Pluto guys feel it's ok to drop xine and use vlc instead.
I made a simple test, i.e on a standard Pluto install (no xfree hack nor xine upgrade) I killed all Pluto stuff and tested manually vlc and xine playing the same divx file (one after the other, not at the same time).
Well... vlc has WAY better performances even with standard xfree drivers, it never looses a frame and overall playback is fluent and audio/video are always in sync.
To get the same behaviour with xine I have to use a patched xfree86 server/driver and xine 1.1.0, but nevertheless it uses more CPU.
I know that vlc has some stability issues, so all we have to do is to wait and find a good compromise with xine in the mean time.
As an update on what I'm testing now, I managed to recompile/install xine 1.1.0 over 1.0.2 release, and things are "almost" working.
"Almost" means that xine does not loose frames nor get out ov a/v sync anymore but sometimes it refuses to play some files, and I have to wait some time and retry.
I didn't figure out yet what it is, I'll have to go deep with the logs.
Regards
Marco
We do have a VLC player, you can remove xine and add vlc.
However it's not fully implemented becaues we had some problems and bugs with VLC, and sent the VLC team requests for help and posted messages in the forum. But VLC seemed quite dead--not one person would ever respond to any of the issues and we couldn't find anybody there would discuss how to fix the VLC bugs. So we're not opposed to vlc, but we cannot become vlc developers--the vlc team needs to have an interest in it
Hi Dan
I know that you are not opposed to VLC, I didn't realize thoug that VLC project was dead.
Sometimes I give a look on their devel site and forum, and there seems to be some activity, and they recently released a beta release of VLC 0.8.4 (around 3 weeks ago).
I totally agree that you are not supposed to become VLC developers, probably at the time you tried to get in touch with them they were focused on other issues (maybe the recent new beta release).
I don't know which are the VLC bugs that you would like to be fixed, but maybe something has been made with latest beta.
Meanwhile I continue with xine, as things are more or less working.
There is only a minor issue, i.e with xine 1.1.0 the wrapper seems to have some problems when closing, so I have to wait for the process to die in order to see a new stream.
This was not happening with .29, so I guess that xine wrapper has been changed.
If I'm still in time for wishes to include in .31, it would be great to have a xine wrapper that can be used with xine 1.0.2 or 1.1.0.
If anyone is interested, I'll post all the steps I performed to have a VIA box hybrid working fine with video playback (with the small issue described above), so maybe also someone else can test and maybe make everything to work also on MD.
Regards
Marco
Here's my posts, maybe if you have some insights we can get this to work. VLC does have a loyal following, so I assume there's a way, but I could never get very far...
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=10525&highlight=
I did get a reply to this one, but using dvdsimple isn't really a solution--just a hack--it just bypasses the dvdmenu and forces you to watch the first title. You really need a way to display the menu:
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=10039&highlight=
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=10041&highlight=
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=9872&highlight=
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=9833&highlight=
As you can see from the posts we had very poor success with VLC. We couldn't get even the most basic stuff to work. For example, with a dvd, we couldn't get the menu to appear. The only proposed solution was bypassing the menus--that means no dvd options. And in dvd's where teh first title is a commentary or 'making of', etc., you can never watch the movie.
The purpose of vlc is distributed audio/video to multiple locations. But we could never get the syncing to work at all. I used the exact samples provided in their docs, but it never worked at all.
Regarding Xine, the .30 release was a real mess because it included an upgrade of our debian sarge mirror. Lots and lots of packages, like xine, asterisk, etc. behaved differently. That's why we try to upgrade our mirror as rarely as possible. But, after 2 weeks or so of writing work-arounds, i think we're about ready to release .31 and we fixed most of the issues. I hope. :)
we're including a new xine in .31 because xine is now the front end for high-def distributed satellite/digital tv using vdr as a back-end. I would need to see that issue with the stream closing to understand it. You can try me on live chat and if you give me remote assistance i'll try to monitor the logs and see what's going on. Obviously we want it to be perfect.
Hi Aaron
Quote from: "aaron.b"
As you can see from the posts we had very poor success with VLC.
I'm sorry about the unlucky response from VLC team. It is really pity, because their piece of sw is really interesting and in my opinion it would perfectly fit in a home automation system.
I know that DVD support is still under development (as they claim on their website) but as you said this is not enough to put it into a production environment.
Quote from: "aaron.b"
we're including a new xine in .31 because xine is now the front end for high-def distributed satellite/digital tv using vdr as a back-end.
This sounds very interesting to me. Are you planning to use xine 1.1.0? If so, this would limit the required "hack" to make Pluto work on VIA box.
From what you said I'm pretty convinced that the small issue I'm facing with xine is related to the major upgrade you made.
I think that the best choice here is to wait for .31, and as soon I get it I will see whether this will clear such issue or not.
Regards
Marco
Hi Aaron,
I think the issue is more to do with controlling VLC from the command line than any lack of basic functionality.
For example using VLC 0.8.1 (the version included in the 2.0.0.30 release of Pluto) from the 'Computing' menu we can play a DVD with onscreen menus working perfectly. Indeed we can play that DVD locally on the MD with the DVD drive and simultaneously stream it to all other MD's on the network in perfect synch. This also works with ISO's ripped and stored on the core.
Give it a try...it really does work! ;-)
Doing battle with the VLC command line is where the problem is I am sure.
Quote from: "aaron.b"We couldn't get even the most basic stuff to work. For example, with a dvd, we couldn't get the menu to appear. The only proposed solution was bypassing the menus--that means no dvd options. And in dvd's where teh first title is a commentary or 'making of', etc., you can never watch the movie.
The purpose of vlc is distributed audio/video to multiple locations. But we could never get the syncing to work at all. I used the exact samples provided in their docs, but it never worked at all.
i think the vlc has a control over tcp or udp. did have a go at making a home tv station using it as a streaming server a few years ago. i'll dig up my notes and have a look at what i did