Haven't installed Linux on a box in quite a while, but decided that I wanted to run MythTv to at least be able to keep my kids videos on a HD and avoid catastrophic destruction of our DVDs.
Went to newegg and bought the following:
nMediaPC HT100SA
ASUS A8N-VM CSM
AMD 3200+
AMPO DDR 3200 512MB RAM
NEC OEM ND-3550A DVD burner
WD 320 GB SATA-2 HD
D-Link DWL-G510 PCI wireless adapter
MS wireless optical desktop 1000
Newegg shipped promptly
I lurked a bit on mysettopbox, mythtv sites, and newegg to select this stuff.
For now I'm using the video out of this MB, have ordered the S-video and S/PDIF dongles from Asus, the former so I can move to TV usage, the latter just in case I need an optical connection in the future. The nMediaPC case has two S/PDIF connectors, but neither is optical.
Assembled the box without much trouble. The nMediaPC seems like a good choice for a combined FE/BE box, a little big for next to the TV, but doesn't look too bad. It has a FP display of CPU fan speed and 2 temperature readings. This is a little gaudy and I plan on replacing it sometime with something that Myth can drive.
I had some confusion over the FP audio cable, and nMedia replied to my email in 24 hours, I was pretty happy with that. I recently asked about how their fan control plays with the MB control of the fan, will see how that goes. [The fan has a knob on the FP for setting the fan speed, I'd rather the CPU controlled that, but don't mind seeing the RPM displayed on the FP].
Ok, assembly was pretty smooth, the box POSTed fine, went on to installing KnoppMyth CD (RD51).
At the partitioning step I got stuck, I kept getting IO errors when trying to create a swap partion (mkswap). I just kept fiddling with the box, rebooting, power cycling, and magically it just started working. I don't understand what was going on, but just went on.
I don't have a tuner card, as I was going to have a run at using my Cablevision SA4200 with firewire (integrated on this MB). So I wasn't real sure how the setup would like that, but I just went ahead and plugged in some answers that seemed reasonable (using the Knoppmyth Pamphlet exclusively).
This seemed to go ok, but having never using Myth before I didn't know what to expect.
Ok, next I moved to getting my wireless PCI card to run. I didn't know ahead of time what I was doing, other than seeing that someone somewhere had gotten this card to run. Turns out that this card has 3 major versions, some with different chipsets. Luckily I had a B1 revision which is supported by MadWifi and was included in RD51. I used the excellent Madwifi beginner's guide to configure the device. At first I had no response to the card, and it wasn't visible in lspci. After reseating the card, it worked perfectly! Now I wanted it to start in DHCP mode at boot time. That took a long time due to my ignorance about Debian. I ended up just pasting the madwifi instructions into the /etc/network/interfaces file as pre-up (including modprobe of ath_pci and scanning for networks). So great, I have wireless working.
On to my RF keyboard, no dice, refusing address on every USB port. Reading around various sites I try fussing with my BIOS, disabling the kernel high speed kernel module, no avail. So I plugged it into my WinXP Dell, doesn't work there either. I'll try to get a replacement from newegg. So for now I'm sharing a keyboard between my Mythbox and Windows box.
I wanted this box to backup our DVDs so went on to see if the DVD player was working, put in Dora DVD, nothing but a bunch of errors. I had read some thinly veiled references to the lib I needed, apt-get got me going and I was happily watching Dora on my 15" MAG monitor.
So editing one file and installing one library was all I have done to this point and I was again pretty happy (except that MS keyboard).
I wanted to experiment with DVD ripping so I ripped 3 24 minute episodes of Dora at ISO copy, excellent, and good quality. The ISO for 24 minutes was a whopping 4.5GB but took only 5 minutes. Excellent quality took 3+ hours and resulted in a 1.3GB file, and good quality took 30 minutes and 306MB. Good quality isn't quite good enough for me, but the kids were fine with it (even watching it without sound which I hadn't worked on yet).
Sound; when I plugged in my external speakers, nothing. Did I connect up to the right color (pink or green, with indecipherable helpful icons). Did I misconnect the FP audio cable even though nMediaPC had helped me. Again on this forum I read about alsamixer, so I brought that up in a different VT. I turned on all the sources and nothing. I ran alsaconfig and that did its magic but no sound. In hindsight I hoped that I didn't screw anything up. I turned off the machine to get back to real life, when I came back and booted, sound was working. Did I do anything useful, don't know. Isn't there some way the sound can be enabled during install without having to start a unrelated program?
For some reason MythGames stopped working, I had played the Penguin game earlier, but now when I type Enter on the game name nothing happens. In general its just not obvious what key options are useful on a given screen/item. Looking in the keyboard setup told me most of what I wanted to know, but some online help would have been good too. Was I even launching the game, I have no idea.
I still need to get a keyboard, TV out working, and then try to integrate with the digital cable box with firewire. I'll follow up when I get a chance.
So far it's taken me 3 days off and on to get to this point, and I'm pretty satisfied at the progress. I left out the trouble I had getting program listings, but running mythfilldatabase seemed to clear that up.