DVR (2 of 3): Operating System
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Tuesday, Nov 15, 2005 / 12:16pm View more articles
In the first part of this communiqué series I discussed some of the overall motivation I had for this project, and what hardware I chose to use. If you are thinking about setting up a computer for a DVR, or complete media center (which is what I did), it is a good place to get some suggestions for hardware. However, right now I am going to discuss how I chose the operating system for my media PC, and some useful information about setting it up.
At this point I had to sort through the multitude of Linux distributions that exist. I did a little research on the web about MythTV and I found that Gentoo, Debian, and Fedora seemed to have the best setup guides. I went from there and downloaded each distribution and burned it to CD. I vaguely remember trying to install Gentoo and Debian. Debian would not detect my raid card (thus making it impossible to install onto) and I would not find any information online about how to get it working. Gentoo had a painful looking text-based install that discouraged me very quickly. After all I have learned about Linux, I still have no intention of ever installing Gentoo from scratch.
My final installation was Fedora Core 4. This distribution had a very nice and easy to use installer, but would not detect my raid card either. However, with Google's help I was able to find a solution. It turns out that my raid card (an LSI Logic MegaRaid i4) used an old megaraid driver. Recently in the 2.6 Linux kernel, the megaraid driver was replaced with the megaraid_mbox driver that greatly improved the performance of the newer megaraid cards. Unfortunately this improvement was at the cost of preventing the older megaraid cards from working. The strange part was that the megaraid_mbox driver would detect my raid card, but would not show any of my configured arrays. I finally found the solution which was to type "linux noprobe" at the beginning of the installation of Fedora Core, and to manually select the old megaraid driver rather than having FC4 auto-detect the new megaraid_mbox driver.
One of the decisions I had to make during installation was what filesystems I wanted to use. There are quite a few more choices with Linux than with Windows, so I ended up doing a bit of research. The biggest thing to be concerned about was that the video files being created by the DVR would be very large. This can cause problems with certain filesystem because the filesystem will often halt all other operations while a large file is being deleted. After I was done, the 110GB partition and the 950 GB (since manufacturers calculate 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, rather than 1,073,741,824 byes I really only have 950 GB of space, not 1 TB) were running the jfs filesystem. This filesystem was developed by IBM, and is one of the fastest journaled filesystems. A journaled filesystem prevents long filesystem checks after crashes and power outages, and allow partially failed commands to be reversed. FC4 is installed on an ext3 partition since ext3 has been extensively tested for boot partition filesystems, and since it is also a journaled filesystem. Later on, I added Windows XP to the mix on an NTFS partition.
The rest of the installation was a breeze. All of my hardware was automatically detected except for my tuner card (details about my hardware can be found in the first part of this series DVR (1 of 3): Hardware). I decided to go with KDE for my window manager since it was recommended by Jarod Wilson's guide, and selected a few other options during the installation such as Windows Networking (Samba), and some development libraries (so I could compile programs on my own).
At this point I decided to download the Nvidia drivers for my Graphics card (so that advanced features were supported). This was fairly easy to do, the only hitch being able to get the graphics card to run my Dell 2001FP at 1600x1200 over the DVI connection. It seems that in recent Nvidia Linux drivers the option to run 1600x1200 has been disabled over the DVI connection because there was not enough bandwidth at the default frequency. I was able to resolve this by adding the following mode line to my Monitor configuration in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
Another step to get my hardware completely hardware working was to obtain the drivers for my Hauppauge PVR-500MCE tuner card. This card is supported in Linux by the IVTV driver. Right now I am running an older development release (version 0.3.9) that seems to be working just fine with my card. This driver is still in heavy development, but had reached a mature enough point to support the new PVR500MCE when I was purchasing the parts for my DVR. Once I had installed the drivers, I needed to add a line to my /etc/modprobe.conf file to tell Fedora to use the drivers. The code is below:
Finally, I wanted to set up my ATI Remote Wonder to act as an LIRC remote control, rather than the default for Linux (which is as a mouse). To do this I had to remove the ati_remote.ko kernel module from my kernel and add the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:
That pretty much wraps up most of the special exceptions I ran into while installing FC4 on my system. Again, I would highly encourage anyone building a MythTV box on Fedora to check out Jarod Wilson's guide.
Having installed Windows so many time, the Windows XP installation was pretty much a breeze, except I had to deal with the fact that Windows likes to take over the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the drive it is installed on, which of course deletes the boot loader that Linux installed. To solve this I loaded my system up using a live Linux CD (Knoppix to be exact) and reinstalled grub into the MBR. Once I had reinstalled grub, I was able to easily add a boot option for Windows XP to the grub menu, and now I have the choice to boot into Linux or Windows (Linux boots by default). The other problem I ran into when installing Windows after Linux was that Windows decided my Linux partitions should be labeled C: and D: even though it could not read them. Thus Windows labeled its own partition as E:. I ran into some problems installing some software (software makers seem to like to hard-code C: into temp directory locations and stuff), so I found a nice batch-replace registry editor for windows and replaced every entry of E: in the registry with C:. Amazingly this seemed to work fine, and I was able to boot into windows without trouble on my newly relabeled C: drive!
If you are working on setting up MythTV for yourself, I would encourage you to view the first part of this communiqué and checking out some of the links I provided. They were especially helpful from my experiences. Also be sure to check back tomorrow for the final installment of this series where I discuss setting up the software (MythTV) and some supporting components. Hopefully after that I will write one last communiqué about my DVR with some photos, screen shots, and other general information.
Operating System
Originally when I was first considering building my own DVR, I had looked into Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition for the operating system. The things I didn't really like about it were that I needed to pay for it, that it was updated much less frequently than its Linux counterparts, and that it was not a customizable. The other benefit to choosing Linux was knowledge that comes along with it. I am fairly well versed in Windows XP, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to expand my horizons. Below you will find some snippets of information about my installation that I thought would be useful for other people. Obviously this is not nearly a complete installation guide. Jarod Wilson has already done that for Fedora Core.Linux
At this point I had to sort through the multitude of Linux distributions that exist. I did a little research on the web about MythTV and I found that Gentoo, Debian, and Fedora seemed to have the best setup guides. I went from there and downloaded each distribution and burned it to CD. I vaguely remember trying to install Gentoo and Debian. Debian would not detect my raid card (thus making it impossible to install onto) and I would not find any information online about how to get it working. Gentoo had a painful looking text-based install that discouraged me very quickly. After all I have learned about Linux, I still have no intention of ever installing Gentoo from scratch.
My final installation was Fedora Core 4. This distribution had a very nice and easy to use installer, but would not detect my raid card either. However, with Google's help I was able to find a solution. It turns out that my raid card (an LSI Logic MegaRaid i4) used an old megaraid driver. Recently in the 2.6 Linux kernel, the megaraid driver was replaced with the megaraid_mbox driver that greatly improved the performance of the newer megaraid cards. Unfortunately this improvement was at the cost of preventing the older megaraid cards from working. The strange part was that the megaraid_mbox driver would detect my raid card, but would not show any of my configured arrays. I finally found the solution which was to type "linux noprobe" at the beginning of the installation of Fedora Core, and to manually select the old megaraid driver rather than having FC4 auto-detect the new megaraid_mbox driver.
One of the decisions I had to make during installation was what filesystems I wanted to use. There are quite a few more choices with Linux than with Windows, so I ended up doing a bit of research. The biggest thing to be concerned about was that the video files being created by the DVR would be very large. This can cause problems with certain filesystem because the filesystem will often halt all other operations while a large file is being deleted. After I was done, the 110GB partition and the 950 GB (since manufacturers calculate 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, rather than 1,073,741,824 byes I really only have 950 GB of space, not 1 TB) were running the jfs filesystem. This filesystem was developed by IBM, and is one of the fastest journaled filesystems. A journaled filesystem prevents long filesystem checks after crashes and power outages, and allow partially failed commands to be reversed. FC4 is installed on an ext3 partition since ext3 has been extensively tested for boot partition filesystems, and since it is also a journaled filesystem. Later on, I added Windows XP to the mix on an NTFS partition.
The rest of the installation was a breeze. All of my hardware was automatically detected except for my tuner card (details about my hardware can be found in the first part of this series DVR (1 of 3): Hardware). I decided to go with KDE for my window manager since it was recommended by Jarod Wilson's guide, and selected a few other options during the installation such as Windows Networking (Samba), and some development libraries (so I could compile programs on my own).
At this point I decided to download the Nvidia drivers for my Graphics card (so that advanced features were supported). This was fairly easy to do, the only hitch being able to get the graphics card to run my Dell 2001FP at 1600x1200 over the DVI connection. It seems that in recent Nvidia Linux drivers the option to run 1600x1200 has been disabled over the DVI connection because there was not enough bandwidth at the default frequency. I was able to resolve this by adding the following mode line to my Monitor configuration in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
ModeLine "1600x1200@60" 130.25 1600 1648 1680 1760 1200 1203 1207 1235
Another step to get my hardware completely hardware working was to obtain the drivers for my Hauppauge PVR-500MCE tuner card. This card is supported in Linux by the IVTV driver. Right now I am running an older development release (version 0.3.9) that seems to be working just fine with my card. This driver is still in heavy development, but had reached a mature enough point to support the new PVR500MCE when I was purchasing the parts for my DVR. Once I had installed the drivers, I needed to add a line to my /etc/modprobe.conf file to tell Fedora to use the drivers. The code is below:
# PVR500
alias char-major-81 ivtv
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias char-major-81-1 ivtv
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
Finally, I wanted to set up my ATI Remote Wonder to act as an LIRC remote control, rather than the default for Linux (which is as a mouse). To do this I had to remove the ati_remote.ko kernel module from my kernel and add the following line to /etc/modprobe.conf:
# ATI REMOTE
alias char-major-61 lirc_atiusb
alias lirc_dev lirc_atiusb
That pretty much wraps up most of the special exceptions I ran into while installing FC4 on my system. Again, I would highly encourage anyone building a MythTV box on Fedora to check out Jarod Wilson's guide.
Windows XP
Having installed Windows so many time, the Windows XP installation was pretty much a breeze, except I had to deal with the fact that Windows likes to take over the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the drive it is installed on, which of course deletes the boot loader that Linux installed. To solve this I loaded my system up using a live Linux CD (Knoppix to be exact) and reinstalled grub into the MBR. Once I had reinstalled grub, I was able to easily add a boot option for Windows XP to the grub menu, and now I have the choice to boot into Linux or Windows (Linux boots by default). The other problem I ran into when installing Windows after Linux was that Windows decided my Linux partitions should be labeled C: and D: even though it could not read them. Thus Windows labeled its own partition as E:. I ran into some problems installing some software (software makers seem to like to hard-code C: into temp directory locations and stuff), so I found a nice batch-replace registry editor for windows and replaced every entry of E: in the registry with C:. Amazingly this seemed to work fine, and I was able to boot into windows without trouble on my newly relabeled C: drive!
If you are working on setting up MythTV for yourself, I would encourage you to view the first part of this communiqué and checking out some of the links I provided. They were especially helpful from my experiences. Also be sure to check back tomorrow for the final installment of this series where I discuss setting up the software (MythTV) and some supporting components. Hopefully after that I will write one last communiqué about my DVR with some photos, screen shots, and other general information.
Comments
Tuesday, Aug 29, 2006 / 8:46am
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I think Windows still did recognize the D: partition, and I used the Disk Management Console to remove the drive letter. You can open it by going to Start -> Run and then entering "diskmgmt.msc"
Once in the disk management console, right click on the drive (in the lower section) and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.... From there you can delete the drive letter.
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WRT to your Windows XP install after you ran the batch-replace registry editor did it still see your other Linux partition as D:? I have this problem, with Windows keen to format the Linux partitions any time the mouse goes near them.