Well if it locks up on a regular basis you have some sort of bug or configuration problem. Mine doesn't fall over unless the power goes out.

If you are having problems with command line as well as X you may well have some sort of nfs problem or something, but you would be amazed how much the improper X driver can affect even the menus in mythtv. Just ask Liv2cod and I assure you his box is not slow by any strech of the imagination, but he saw a huge difference going from the nv drivers to the proprietary nvidia drivers.

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Xsecrets

On the topic of slowness, has anyone done a direct comparison to Tivo? Although my Tivo sometimes has slowness accessing certain UI screens, the video handling is always flawless.

I've been talking here about the slowness of the VIA EPIA that I want to use as a front end, but even my Myth Backend doesn't quite measure up in a head to head comparison with my Tivo.

My backend is a Dell SC420 with a 2.something GHz Celeron and TV output is accomplished via a PVR350. When I fastforward and rewind it's very "jumpy" both in video display and the time counter. Unlike Tivo where fast forward appears to be simply playing at a higher frame rate, my Myth setup is more like:

jump ahead, display a frame, pause, jump ahead again, display a frame, pause

It's very hard to fast forward to a specific point. Also, the rewind compensation is over-agressive. If I hit rewind for 1-2 seconds then hit play it "compensates" back to the starting point. If there's a feature equivalent to Tivo's "instant replay" I've got to get it mapped onto my remote.

I've really got to congratulate the Tivo folks. When I bought my series 1 Tivo 3 or 4 years ago the out of the box experience was flawless. MythTV has a lot more features, but I've spent more money on MythTV hardware than I did on Tivo and despite all the hard work of the MythTV people and the KnoppMyth team it still doesn't match the "out of the box" experience of "it just works" that the Tivo team acheived years ago.

Everybody working on MythTV is doing some impressive work, but it's just making me realize how much I underestimated the magnitude of what the Tivo team accomplished.

can't say much about the ff/rw as I don't use it I use skip. which by the way is the setup "out of the box" so you've obviously changed something to get ff/rw and If I remember correctly the back button is mapped to 5 sec by default which would make it pretty similar to the instant replay wouldn't it?

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Xsecrets

I'd balance that with the fact that while the TiVo team wrote their client to work directly with the mpeg2-aware video-out hardware, mythtv is outputting the video through a couple of layers of abstraction from the hardware (with some acceleration thrown in to some configurations to make it less painful) so as to not lock users into a very strict set of hardware requirements.

But yeah, I do miss some of the efficiency of the tivo video controls.

-brendan

I'm pretty sure I didn't change anything related to key mapping of the remote control. I did follow an instruction I found in the forum for adding a command to an init script because lircd did not start up automatically in R5A12 (a "ps aux|grep -i lirc" verified it was not running) and I think there was also an instruction to copy a sample config file in order to use the Hauppage gray remote.

One thing I did do, was in the Myth GUI I check-marked an option to use "sticky" FF/RW. That was before I got the remote working and I was using the arrow keys on the keyboard (also before I got the PVR350 video out working) and the default config was that it only FF/RW'd while I held the key down.

It's just really impressive to me that the Tivo folks were able to create a hardware and software package where just everything worked so well right out of the box with no tweaking and just a few basic configuration steps. Even though lots of other folks have surpassed them in number of features and flexibility of hardware, they hit a sweet spot of usability with dead on accuracy.

ahh yeah that use sticky is what changed yours to doing ff/rw instead of skip.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Actually, I think you are OVERestimating the magnitude of what the TiVo team has done.

It is much more straightforward to decide on a fixed hardware platform that satisfies a core set of requirements (record TV on a hard disk, play it back, add a few nice scheduling and time-shifting features) than it is to write a PC app that has to work with a wide array of hardware and software interfaces. Now, I'm not saying that TiVo was a walk in the park for the developers, but it is much easier to add that final spit and polish to the design when you don't have people bugging you to support all their different hardware configs (everything from bleeding-edge to legacy stuff) or their favorite flavor of linux.

The Myth and KnoppMyth developers have put together a sweet package. Personally, I would have gone with TiVo if they had even a tiny bit of the flexibility (easily share all my media including pictures and music in the formats I want across my entire network with no ads or DRM worries) that MythTV has. Plus there is that wretched subscription fee. I am sick of everyone trying to milk that business model. Just make a decent piece of hardware and let me use it. Then make better ones with better features so I have a reason to give you more money to buy another one. I would have forked over the cash for a TiVo a long time ago if it weren't for the subscription fees.

I've got a backend running using R5B7. I'm trying to get a 500 MHz P3 (256MB) running as a diskless frontend. I set the bios to boot over network and I've run prep-ts and run "/etc/init.d/knoppix-terminalserver" to start the terminal server, although I get a few messages and warnings that worry me:

cp: cannot stat `(0xffffe000)': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `(0xffffe000)': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `(0xffffe000)': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `(0xffffe000)': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `(0xffffe000)': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/dev/systty': No such file or directory
...
Disk full
...
Exporting directories for NFS kernel daemon...exportfs: /etc/exports[4]: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export "*:/myth".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
Note: this default has changed from previous versions.
...

#1 Does anyone know if these erros and messages are significant?

Anyway, I booted my FE machine and it does display the following:

Manged PC Boot Agent (MBA) v3.10 (BIOS Integrated)
Node: 0050049B877B
DHCP..
TFTP.........

And then the PC hangs. I'm assuming that since the FE machine is printing messages about DHCP and TFTP, it is attempting to boot from the network.

Also, when I configured the terminal server, I specified the IP range from 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.50 which is the DHCP range of the router that all my machines are hooked up to. 192.168.1.100 is the IP address of my BE machine and 192.168.1.104 is the IP address of my FE machine.

#2 Did I set this up right?

#3 I don't know much about DHCP, but is it ok for my router to be running a DCHP server and for my BE box to be also running one? Or would they somehow conflict?

Later in the terminalserver configuration, I had the specify "Client hardware" which stated "Choose network card(s) to support/probe on client machiens:". My FE machine has a 3COM 3C905B-TX NIC. But I didn't see a driver for that model listed there. I tried clicking all the 3C* *.ko files, but I still get the hang on the FE machine after getting the DHCP and TFTP messages.

#4 I'm assuming that I need to install the 3C90X driver on my BE box. Am I correct?

So, I pull them from the 3COM site but when I try to install them, it tells me that I need to compile them for my kernel. When I run their compile scripts, I get a slew of errors.

#5 Can anyone point me to some directions on how to compile drivers on linux (I'm a linux noobie)?

#6 I don't know much about linux drivers, but since the 3C905B-TX NIC is on my frontend box, is it ok for me to install the driver on my BE box? I'm assuming that installed drivers on a linux box don't do anything if it doesn't detect the corresponding HW.

#7 Finally, I'm making the assumption that the root of my problems has to do with the driver for my FE not residing on my BE box. Any opinions on whether this assumption is right given the symptoms I listed?

Thanks in advance for any help.
Tomoo

I'm away from home on vacation at the moment, so I cannot physically double check... But the problem may be that the computer is grabbing a IP from your router and not your backend. The configuration option for IP range is for the DHCP server on the backend. Disable the DHCP server on your router and try again.

Thanks. I'll give that a try.

Ok, I disabled the DHCP server on my router and fired up knoppix-terminalserver. I specified a DHCP range on the terminalserver to be 192.168.1.200 to 192.168.1.250, so I can distinguish it from the router DHCP server which by default assigns 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.150. I verified that when I forced computers on my network to reacquire IP addresses, they got addresses in the range of 192.168.1.200 to 192.168.1.250, so knoppix-terminalserver is the one serving ip address on my network.

But when I try to boot my frontend machine with only the knoppix-terminalserver running, I get the same behavior as before.

Does anyone have an aopinion whether the fact that my backend machine doesn't have the 3C90X driver installed might be the cause of my problems? Or have any other ideas?

After digging through the 3com driver website, I found out that the 3c59x.ko driver (which R5B7 includes) supports the 3c905b-tx NIC. So I guess that's not the problem. At a complete loss as to what is wrong.

Any help or ideas for diagnositcs would be appreciated.

Since I'm having so much trouble with a netboot, I am considering other solutions and was wondering if they were possible.

My main goal is to get a quiet front end box for the bedroom. If I had the money, I'd build a EPIA fanless/diskless box, but since I found this P3 (which I've been trying to netboot) in the trash, I thought I'd give it a shot at making it a front end. The first thing I did was disconnect the really noisy harddrive and do a cd boot of the front end. This worked fine with my backend. I would use this as a solution since it appears that the cd stops after everything is running and all I have are power supply and cpu cooling fans, but I couldn't get lirc running with it and I didn't know of a way to save conguration information (like ip address of the backend). If I can solve those problems, I'm ok with giving up on the netboot for the time being.

Is it possible for the frontend save its configuration information on something like a thumb drive so that I can have a frontend boot totally automatically with a power switch (with no user intervention to set backend ip address and remote settings)?

Another (possibly silly) idea was whether the frontend could be installed on a 512MB or 1GB usb thumb drive. Is that enough room? How do you just install the frontend to disk (or do you have to install everything and then remove what you don't want)?

I have wanted something like this also I think (big think) that a remaster of a bootable linux like DSL (or KnoppMyth) would allow this but the info would be hardcoded. Good for you not so good for general purpose. It needs to be able to pull this info from a text file that could be added to a multi session cd.

A project probably above my head but if I find a spare machine I may try it.


Craig

Seems to me that a good route to go, in the Diskless Front End arena, would be to boot from a USB Flash Drive. With USB keys getting so inexpensive, it looks like a natural. No CD or hard drive necessary in the front end, and none of the contortions necessary to get things to boot over the network.

Yes I know there are all those uncertainties of motherboards & BIOS that claim to be capable of booting from USB, but actually don't. I can't help but figure it would be faster than booting from a CD or over the network. Wouldn't it also be easier to put the customised config file there, than the initial "multi-session CD" suggestion?

A few Linux distros have started to include scripts to install a bootable version onto flash drives. Puppy Linux, for example, has that as an option. I tried it, and it worked well.

Of course, I'm talking through my hat here. I barely have a Knoppmyth box running, and I don't have the skills to execute the above proposal. But I know it's posable, and sounds good in theory.

Let the trashing by the experts begin!

Ian