 | gkar, A MythTV SystemThe name "gkar" comes from a character on the syndicated television show " Babylon 5". He was the Ambassador from Narn. I bought several components for this system at a local shop called Logic Approach. The list is shown in Table 1, “ Components Bought For gkar (1st Attempt) ”. Table 1. Components Bought For gkar (1st Attempt)
Steps in assembly. The motherboard presented no problem. The mounting posts did not have to be repositioned. I installed the power supply in the case and attached the the main motherboard power connector and a smaller, four pin connector that seems to be of the same style as the main connector. After installing the power supply to get a good electrical ground and prevent electostatic discharge, I installed the CPU very carefully. I checked the orientation closely so that I wouldn't inadvertently bend a pin. After that I installed the fan. It had a coating of conductive material on the CPU side that seemed powdery and fragile. I positioned it on the CPU and hooked the tension bracket in on both sides. I then rotated the handle to apply tension, seating the fan firmly over the CPU. I connected the fan power to the posts on the motherboard. No problems installing the memory. I noticed that the DDR2 memory has a different socket key placement. There's only one notch rather than two. At this point sufficient resources are available to boot the system and get some idea if the system is working or not. I hooked up a monitor and keyboard and fired it up. The first thing I saw was a notice that the last overclocking value wasn't valid and then the message went away. I hit the del key and was put into the CMOS setup screen. I went to the system information item on the first page and noticed the memory was less than I expected. I saved the values and rebooted. During the memory test it stated that 128MB was "shared" memory. I'm not sure what that is about, but if I added the 128MB to the amount of tested memory I got the 512MB I was expecting. Having successfully booted the system to CMOS, I continued with the installation of the removable media devices, a used DVD reader (not the one listed in the above inventory) and a floppy drive. I discovered that the floppy cable connector keys were incompatible with the cable, so I had to disable the floppy drive in the CMOS. I connected the DVD drive and booted up. It recognized the DVD drive, but it wouldn't open up when the eject button was pressed. After replacing the DVD drive, I inserted CD number 1 from the Fedora Core 6 distribution and booted up to see if it could read it. It worked as expected. I then replaced that DVD drive with the brand new DVD drive. One thing I discovered is that if the CMOS checksum fails, the defaults are loaded which results in no output to the DVI attached monitor. A VGA monitor is needed to see the output. Usually, a CMOS checksum failure happens when the configuration has changed, such as adding or removing a disk drive. The BIOS settings that I've changed are shown in Table 2, “BIOS Settings”. I found that the missing 128MB of memory was being allocated for the on-board video. Now that basic assembly is done, it is time to install the operating system. I've chosen Fedora 7 as previous issues with this distro have been resolved. The installation went smoothly. The update however didn't go as smoothly. It went very slowly and I started seeing errors as shown in Figure 1, “ATA Error Message”. The first thing I found was a thread that suggested that a newer kernel would do the trick. I interrupted the update then did a single yum update of the kernel. That didn't fix the problem. I found another thread that seemed to suggest that the power cable was too close to the data cable. I tied up the cables and separated them. As it turned out the problem was actually with the DVD drive and the smart daemon. Once I told the smart daemon to ignore the DVD drive, the problem went away. The motherboard included a video adapter which I used to get the system running. I installed the PCI video adapter and hooked up the Viewsonic console to it. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I hooked up the original monitor to the PCI video card using the DVI to VGA adapter that came with the card. It still didn't work. I reconnected the monitor to the on-board VGA adapter and found a setting in the bios that set the primary adapter. It was set to the PCIe value (on-board maybe?). I changed the value to PCI and the monitor started working. The trick to getting the Viewsonic display to work was to turn off the monitor and the PC then connect the two together. The manual indicated that the monitor should be turned on before the PC. The next issue was to get the display to a wide-screen resolution. The nvidia driver didn't seem to want to drive the screen greater than 1024x768. I could change the settings, but it seems like they wouldn't retain over a restart of the X server. There didn't seem to be a backup file around even though the interface claimed that one was written. I went to the nvidia web site and found a linux driver. The installation couldn't find a working kernel module so it built one and installed it. The highest resolution seems to be 1400x1050. Fortunately, the video card I picked is highly recommended for use with MyhtTV. It supports the X video motion compensation interface (XvMC). This allows the graphics card to do a lot of the work of video decoding, rather than the CPU. Another issue that I discovered is that when the system is shut down, it didn't seem to shut all the way down. There would be no output to the display. I found some discussions that indicated that the issue could be due to shutting down within the gnome session. I did get better results by exiting the session then shutting down. The problem with the lack of output is still there. Perfect, I thought I had gotten an HD tuner that was supported under linux. My previous tuner was a Hauppauge, so I thought they would continue providing support for linux. The site states that they are working on linux support. I Should have checked ahead of time. I ended up purchasing a pcHDTV tuner card as they primarily focus on linux support. The kernel code for the drivers for the different components of the card were already in the 2.6.22 kernel. I discovered that there were performance issues with MythTV that couldn't be fixed with additional memory. The recommended configuration uses a 3GHz P4 CPU. I decided to go ahead and replace the CPU and motherboard. The 3GHz CPU was quite a bit more expensive than the 2.66 GHz so I decided to chance the slower CPU. The new configuration is shown in Table 3, “Components Bought For gkar (2nd Attempt)”. Table 3. Components Bought For gkar (2nd Attempt)
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