VIA supported yet? - MSI CN700T

[usaf-lt-g]

Hey guys,

 
It's been a while since I've posted anything... mostly because I was waiting on some type of solution for my setup. Last I played with LinuxMCE was back in February, and I had just purchased my first media director, which was unsupported because of the on-board graphics chipset being VIA.

The motherboard that's in the media director is an MSI CN700. And my Core is currently running Beta 3 at the moment. The Media Director would work on a netboot up to the point where it needed to load X-windows for obvious graphic driver reasons.

Just curious if there's been any solution / workaround / fix for this yet that would be easy for me to implement. Thanks!

-=USAF=- LT G

[freymann]

It's been a while since I've posted anything... mostly because I was waiting on some type of solution for my setup. Last I played with LinuxMCE was back in February, and I had just purchased my first media director, which was unsupported because of the on-board graphics chipset being VIA.

 Short answer:  No.

 Longer answer: But you can try to install the latest video drivers and see what happens. You stand a good chance of getting UI1 going so it's worth a revisit.

 The page:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers

 has via instructions.

 One other solution is to install MythBuntu 7.10 on that box. Give it the IP# of your LMCE Core. You'll be able to watch TV through it no problem.

 I have a second drive in my core that stores the majority of our media, so I just mapped that drive on the MythBuntu box and set the paths inside mythSetup to the video, audio and picture directories. Works like a charm.

[usaf-lt-g]

Well I attempted to follow that guide, and got up to the point where I could attempt to do a make and it wouldn't let me. When I ran the ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr command, it complained about an xorg server not being present.

I also noted that the help provided in that guide hasn't worked for other people. But I know people have been successful. Even if I can get this MD to work with UI1 support, I will be happy.

Can anyone offer a good guide to get this up and running? Basically my MD is NETBIOS based boot, diskless, and I can only SSH to it. It halts prior to loading up X Windows because the graphic drivers aren't there yet.

How can I get this to work? Thanks!

[usaf-lt-g]

Here's how far I've gotten using these steps:

I ran the: ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr command, and it produces the following on my MD:

checking for XORG... configure: error: Package requirements (xorg-server xproto xvmc fontsproto libdrm ) were not met:

No package 'xorg-server' found
No package 'xvmc' found
No package 'libdrm' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables XORG_CFLAGS
and XORG_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

 

[freymann]

Well I attempted to follow that guide, and got up to the point where I could attempt to do a make and it wouldn't let me. When I ran the ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr command, it complained about an xorg server not being present.

 Yep. I believe that's why there's a note that those instructions didn't work.

 There's a link to the binary drivers in the sentences above that section. Link 1. You can go there and download the binary and install those drivers quite easily and see what happens.

[usaf-lt-g]

Well, I got the driver installed (unichrome), and made it to the A/V wizard for the MD. However, I'm still experiencing difficulties. Apparently, when I restart the MD now, it freezes everytime at a Timer screen during bootup.

"..Timer: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1"

I've tried deleting the MD from the core and rebuilt it several times, and i'm still getting unstability. Actually the only time I was ever to get the A/V wizard to come up was last night, and everything was working, until after the MD rebooted.

Keep in mind the MD is Net bootable only, doesn't have it's own HD, or CD-Rom etc. I'm also currently running 704 B3. I downloaded 710 today, but am weary of doing an upgrade on the core yet. I'd like to keep all my settings.... but that's neither here nor there. I'd like to get my MD working first.

Thanks for the help.

-=USAF=- LT G

[freymann]

Well, I got the driver installed (unichrome), and made it to the A/V wizard for the MD. However, I'm still experiencing difficulties. Apparently, when I restart the MD now, it freezes everytime at a Timer screen during bootup.

I noticed there were additional instructions in the wiki now relating to the via video drivers. I spent some time yesterday working on my office md. I ended up deleting the md from the web admin panel and booting the md. Once it stopped at the unable to start x error, I switched to another terminal, logged in as root, and ran all the apt-get's required.

After installing the unichrome driver, I then did a

X -configure

and copied ~/xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as up to this point, there was no xorg.conf file to edit.

Then I rebooted and I believe the A/V Wizard worked fine. Maybe those steps will work for you?

Using UI1, I can move around OK, but videos still studder and MythTV once again loads and then exits in about 30 seconds. I was able to shell into the box and the load averages were anywhere between 2-3 (or 65%) with Xine_Player sucking up most of the resources. When I did play video, it studdered and eventually would just lock the entire box requiring a hard reset.

So much for that experiment. I guess I'll have to stick with MythBuntu 7.10 for a while longer.

What worries me even more is the same problem with MythTV exists. I had tried a couple other spare computers as MD's a few weeks ago and everything worked fine except launching TV. It would attempt to load MythTV then exit in 30-45 seconds, but if you went to the KDE desktop and launched MythFrontEnd, everything works fine.

Keep in mind the MD is Net bootable only, doesn't have it's own HD, or CD-Rom etc. I'm also currently running 704 B3. I downloaded 710 today, but am weary of doing an upgrade on the core yet.

 Same here. Plain MD, but I'm using 7.10RC2 AMD64 on the core. It did detect the md a i386. My issues with the MythTV problem happened on both a i386 md and another amd64 md so I can't say if using the AMD64 code is the problem.

[usaf-lt-g]

Lol... yea those new instructions posted on the wiki.... lol... they were mine. I finally got my MD to load correctly. I had to go to the core's /tftpboot directory and find the MD # and edit the file (which is named after the MAC) and place the apic=off string in the APPEND line. After that, my MD came up. Although for whatever reason... I still can't get it to play off the HDMI connection, no matter how I configure it in the A/V wizard. It always wants to display on the VGA cable. Bah... at least it's displaying something now.