Chronicles of a not so easy upgrade to .40

[archived]

Hi all

sorry to come up with a topic that may seem a bit outdated, but I've been busy with other stuff and I didn't have much time to put in Pluto.

Moreover the automatic upgrade did definitely NOT work for me so I had very hard times.

The basic point is that I cannot go for a fresh install on my actual hybrid, so I have to put together all pieces by hand and I hope someone will help me to go through this.

Let's go with order.
As I said upgrade scripts did not work, they fired up but started to cycle and asking me to continually reboot. Kernel upgrade was properly performed (still a udev rule error at startup, but I can live with it).

It ended up that I had to manually install/upgrade all remaining packages.

Here comes my first doubt : did I install everything? I deduced packages list from apt-cache and then passed it to apt-get, but I'm still afraid that something is still missing.
Can anyone post the complete set of packages? Is it possible at this stage to re-run the update procedures/scripts in order to settle what may be still pending?

Now hybrid is more or less working, even if on startup a message appears on OnscreenOrbiter saying that one or more devices did not start. I guess it may be External Media Identifier, but I have no idea on how to get rid of this.

On my hybrid that I can play avi and mp3 files but I can't use mythtv anymore. Playing with mythsetup I was able to access only once to my recordings, but tv programs were only video (no audio) and video quality was poor (not fluent). I guess that this may be a config issue, but for instance I've seen that some settings of my PVR350 have been changed (now mythtv assumes to use tuner1 instead of tuner0 as before ..).

Has anyone else experienced any kind of issue with mythtv?

Let's talk about Computing section.
Did anyone succeed in adding a new application?. I try to add one but after this attempt every time I click on Computing label my router reloads. Log says something about a Quick Start application that has not code to execute.
Then I've removed my application, but still cannot access to Computing section on orbiter.
The point is that in .39 I used to have a nice script to launch xine telling it to play the avi file on the cd.
Now things seems way more complicated, and I kindly ask some help.

Is there any way to reset Computing section to its original settings?

Now on to MD.
I've one based on VIA EPIA hw (it was my previous hybrid) and I have to say that PnP did not work for it. Nevertheless I proceeded as usual and my MD is now on. I selected unicrome drivers and things went like a charm.

Video performance are anyway not good, and I guess there are still problems with Xine_Plugin or Xine_Player like in .39.
When I play an avi file or even a DVD, the beginning of the movie is ok but it progressively the video becomes choppy untill I have to stop it.
This is exactly what used to happen in .39, and it is definitely not related to "missing horse power" of hw.
Surely when video becomes choppy CPU hits 99%, but it makes absolutely no sense. My VIA EPIA MD has a 1 Ghz Nehemiah CPU, and in normal circumstances playing a DVD should not behave like this.
To solve this I used to play DVDs launching xine from Computing section, i.e launching xine not using Xine_Player and this did the trick in .39.

Now I cant' even access to Computing section itself, so my divx collection is unusable.

Did anyone experienced similar issues when playing videos on MD? Anyone with VIA EPIA hw MDs?

This also has a very negative influence on WAF: no cartoons for kids, and wife is already thinking to replace MD with a dvd player ....

I know that there are several issues in this post, I hope that anyway some of you nice guys can bear with me and try to give me a little help.

Thanks in advance and regards

MarcoZan

[archived]

Hi all

sorry to come up with a topic that may seem a bit outdated, but I've been busy with other stuff and I didn't have much time to put in Pluto.

Moreover the automatic upgrade did definitely NOT work for me so I had very hard times.

The basic point is that I cannot go for a fresh install on my actual hybrid, so I have to put together all pieces by hand and I hope someone will help me to go through this.

Let's go with order.
As I said upgrade scripts did not work, they fired up but started to cycle and asking me to continually reboot. Kernel upgrade was properly performed (still a udev rule error at startup, but I can live with it).

It ended up that I had to manually install/upgrade all remaining packages.

Here comes my first doubt : did I install everything? I deduced packages list from apt-cache and then passed it to apt-get, but I'm still afraid that something is still missing.
Can anyone post the complete set of packages? Is it possible at this stage to re-run the update procedures/scripts in order to settle what may be still pending?

Now hybrid is more or less working, even if on startup a message appears on OnscreenOrbiter saying that one or more devices did not start. I guess it may be External Media Identifier, but I have no idea on how to get rid of this.

On my hybrid that I can play avi and mp3 files but I can't use mythtv anymore. Playing with mythsetup I was able to access only once to my recordings, but tv programs were only video (no audio) and video quality was poor (not fluent). I guess that this may be a config issue, but for instance I've seen that some settings of my PVR350 have been changed (now mythtv assumes to use tuner1 instead of tuner0 as before ..).

Has anyone else experienced any kind of issue with mythtv?

Yes, I'm spotting similar problems (tuner 1 for pvr350, chopyness and no sound on recordings - but tried only with mythtvplayer on windows ).

I didn't dig into it yet, cause have other problems, but would suggest that maybe upgrade to 0.20 would be best and then we can try to find out what's wrong... I'm more and more considering to use mythtv only as recording backend...

Let's talk about Computing section.
Did anyone succeed in adding a new application?. I try to add one but after this attempt every time I click on Computing label my router reloads. Log says something about a Quick Start application that has not code to execute.
Then I've removed my application, but still cannot access to Computing section on orbiter.
The point is that in .39 I used to have a nice script to launch xine telling it to play the avi file on the cd.
Now things seems way more complicated, and I kindly ask some help.

Is there any way to reset Computing section to its original settings?

http://plutohome.com/support/mantis/view.php?id=2816

Now on to MD.
I've one based on VIA EPIA hw (it was my previous hybrid) and I have to say that PnP did not work for it. Nevertheless I proceeded as usual and my MD is now on. I selected unicrome drivers and things went like a charm.

Video performance are anyway not good, and I guess there are still problems with Xine_Plugin or Xine_Player like in .39.
When I play an avi file or even a DVD, the beginning of the movie is ok but it progressively the video becomes choppy untill I have to stop it.
This is exactly what used to happen in .39, and it is definitely not related to "missing horse power" of hw.
Surely when video becomes choppy CPU hits 99%, but it makes absolutely no sense. My VIA EPIA MD has a 1 Ghz Nehemiah CPU, and in normal circumstances playing a DVD should not behave like this.
To solve this I used to play DVDs launching xine from Computing section, i.e launching xine not using Xine_Player and this did the trick in .39.

Now I cant' even access to Computing section itself, so my divx collection is unusable.

Did anyone experienced similar issues when playing videos on MD? Anyone with VIA EPIA hw MDs?

Yeap, me. I have 3 of them (Me6000, sp8000 and M9000) but got stuck already on sp8000 that only used to work without hacks on previous versions.

I can't get past step 2 in A/V Wizard and I cannot use MD at all...

http://plutohome.com/support/mantis/view.php?id=2820


I also spot that my Digimatrix is now crawling on video playing and sooner or later freezes (it used to work, although had random freezes under 0.39)..

This also has a very negative influence on WAF: no cartoons for kids, and wife is already thinking to replace MD with a dvd player ....

I know that there are several issues in this post, I hope that anyway some of you nice guys can bear with me and try to give me a little help.

Thanks in advance and regards

MarcoZan

Sorry, cannot give any more help, just shar eyour feelings. But look on the bright side - my kids are not watching TV (recorded videos) anymore (since 0.39 Xine player crashes on my Digimatrix), so they are fed up with this 'freezing' new technology and now more like to spend their time outside the house playing "real" games .... Maybe my wife will follow their example (or me, if I get throuwn out of the house and get replaced by dvd player that is rock solid and stable).... :lol:

Regards,

Rob.

[archived]

As I already mentioned in another post it'd be better to make a fresh 2.0.0.40 installation (IMHO). I played with upgrated system in about two weeks and reinstalled it. The reason was incorrect working udev. My DVB-card was not recognized and many other strange errors. The new installation seems ok. So, I'd suggest you to make a fresh installation.

[archived]

Hi guys and thanks for your replies.

@nite_man : I know that a fresh install may probably clear many of the issues, but so far I can't do it. It's a really remote option and I will go for it only as a last resource.
Reading in this forum and in mantis I got one more reason to wait before reinstalling. If I remember well also Rob is now running a fresh install and he's facing issues very similar to mine. This makes me think that maybe there is something that cannot be settled simply starting everything from scratch.


@tinia: I also had bad times with A/V Wizard on my MD, because on step 2 keyboard was becoming pretty unresponsive. I made several attempt (just hitting and hitting cursor keys until something moved on....) and in the end I passed step 2 with a standard video resolution, that I corrected afterwards from PlutoAdmin.
I used a real keyboard connected to MD, as I did not realize how to play with A/V Wizard with Orbiters.
I remember that you initially tried to recover a failed upgrade, and that you also had a udev related error. Did you solve it before going for a fresh install, and if so can you give me some hints on how you did it?

Thanks again guys for support

Regards
Marco

[archived]

I know that a fresh install may probably clear many of the issues, but so far I can't do it. It's a really remote option and I will go for it only as a last resource.
Reading in this forum and in mantis I got one more reason to wait before reinstalling. If I remember well also Rob is now running a fresh install and he's facing issues very similar to mine. This makes me think that maybe there is something that cannot be settled simply starting everything from scratch.

The main problem, IMHO, is moving to the new kernel. It's very important thing. If you have a time, sure, you should wait.

[archived]

Hi guys and thanks for your replies.

...
@tinia: I also had bad times with A/V Wizard on my MD, because on step 2 keyboard was becoming pretty unresponsive. I made several attempt (just hitting and hitting cursor keys until something moved on....) and in the end I passed step 2 with a standard video resolution, that I corrected afterwards from PlutoAdmin.
I used a real keyboard connected to MD, as I did not realize how to play with A/V Wizard with Orbiters.
I remember that you initially tried to recover a failed upgrade, and that you also had a udev related error. Did you solve it before going for a fresh install, and if so can you give me some hints on how you did it?

Sorry did not solve that one. I decided to go fresh install, cause a lot of things changed and I wanted to take a look at installation process...

Regards,

Rob.

[archived]

Regarding the EPIA SP8000, I've kinda got mine working as a MD, although I've had a few issues.

Initially I couldn't even boot, as it kept getting stuck when trying to set up networking / mounting NFS.  I got past that by adding the kernel option "pci=noacpi", and have now applied a patch and recompiled the kernel to get it working properly.

I too had issues with the AVWizard, to the point where I just removed the startup script so I could get past it and configure the machine manually.  I'm not sure what I missed in doing this, but now I can watch DVDs and use MythTV, although only one or the other without having to reboot

Finally, I've been trying to get the remote working properly.  Partly this is down to a miscompiled lircd, but also there seems to be a bug in the MythTV screens wrt. back/exit.

If anyone wants more details, settings etc. then just shout.  I'm still trying to track down the video problems I have between xine_player and MythTV, plus Myth seems to freeze every so often.  Girlfriend gives her rating as a 3/10 currently.

[archived]

Regarding the EPIA SP8000, I've kinda got mine working as a MD, although I've had a few issues.

Initially I couldn't even boot, as it kept getting stuck when trying to set up networking / mounting NFS.  I got past that by adding the kernel option "pci=noacpi", and have now applied a patch and recompiled the kernel to get it working properly.

I too had issues with the AVWizard, to the point where I just removed the startup script so I could get past it and configure the machine manually.  I'm not sure what I missed in doing this, but now I can watch DVDs and use MythTV, although only one or the other without having to reboot

Finally, I've been trying to get the remote working properly.  Partly this is down to a miscompiled lircd, but also there seems to be a bug in the MythTV screens wrt. back/exit.

If anyone wants more details, settings etc. then just shout.  I'm still trying to track down the video problems I have between xine_player and MythTV, plus Myth seems to freeze every so often.  Girlfriend gives her rating as a 3/10 currently.

Hi,

please post details to forum or yet better to wiki , like I do for Digimatrix
http://plutohome.com/wiki/index.php/ASUS_DIGIMatrix

Every possible info can be useful for another users....

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Rob.

[archived]

Just an update for those running EPIA MDs

I found a (dirty) workaround for video poor performances.

I simply reduced the color depth from 24 bits to 16 bits in xorg.conf.

I couldn't find any place in a/v Wizard nor in Pluto admin to set this parameter, so I edited directly the file in /etc/X11 of the proper MD.

This setting alone does not solve completely frame loss, expecially when looking at DVDs, so I revamped my external scripts in Computing section (thanks Rob for pointing me to proper mantis) and I use them when I have to play a DVD instead of Xine_Player.

Reducing color depth does not make much sense to me anyway, because on the very same box with .39 this extra setting was not necessary.

And with .39 this box was an hybrid, so now it's running a subset of processes and it should be "lighter".

The problem with Xine_Player remains, i.e. it eats too much resources so I have to bypass it with external scripts, but at least MD is working and WAF is again (slowly) rising ...

Now there is an interesting new point, i.e wol.

I think that drivers for VIA rhine network interface driver still contains a bug that makes wol not working. I think I've read somewhere in a forum about a patch, but I don't remember where.

Has anyone found any good solution for this?

Thanks and regards
MarcoZan

[archived]

Hi,

I've tried my ME6000 and it seems that that i386 bug is still present, so workaround is still needed.

I also spot that Xine_player takes a lot of resources even on my hybrid core with 2G Mobile pentium, ripped dvd takes over 50% of cpu (I also have another MD digimatrix that is almost at 100% cpu - Cel 2.4G)... Something has changed significantly...

regarding wol: I'll write few things from my memory. I think there are some hacked bioses where this works, but also remember reading, that wol not working is basically prob lem with shutting down network interface (but could be wrong).... And must admit, that WOL on Digimatrix is now working under new kernel...

I think the best would be to add couple of Wiki pages for few types of epias and add every possible info there. In this case there will be less digging in our heads...

I find Wiki really usefull. I write it there and it stays there (I'm always searching my notes on my machines)...

HTH,

regards,

Rob.