Hi,
Q1
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I'm sure this will be an easy one:

How do I access the CF card using the slot built into the VIA EPIA MII motherboard? I assume its just:

# mount /dev/XXX

but there's allsorts in there and I don't know what I'm looking for.
I don't need to add anything to /etc/fstab do I? And also how do I format a CF card once I get it recognised?

Q2
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I also have a bootable CF-IDE drive on the front of my Casetronic Travla 137. Is there a walkthrough for setting up Knoppmyth to boot from my CF? I want to keep all my media on the Hard Disk and have just knoppmyth on a CF. Is a 256MB CF large enough? Any links to other guides would be appreciated.

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Setup

Casetronic C137 Travla
VIA EPIA MII 1.2ghz
Panasonic DVDRW dual layer Slimline Optical
100GB Seagat HD 2.5"
IDE Compact Flash Card Reader
WinTV PVR 350
Asus WL07G PCMCIA Wireless Card
OS: Knoppmyth R5A16

there is no guide, nor do I personally know of anyone who has booted knoppmyth off a cf card, it would have to be a rather big cf card, however you could ditch the cf card all together and do network boot.

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

Xsecrets

well, everythings possible (in theory)

I have a 512mb card and i know you can get bigger.

How big is the knoppmyth install, inc all the partitions it sets upl?
How do I find that out?
And what if I recompiled the kernel specific to my setup, would that help musch in the way of boot up speed and saving disk space?

Would be nice if the slot built into my epia motherboard was bootable rather than the one on the front through the IDE. And it would be even better if the one on the front was hot swappable and was a multi-card. The setup is a bit backwards if you ask me.

If you are interested in trying the network boot option, search this forum for prep-ts and google for "linux terminal server".

well of course anything is possible, but if you are looking to boot from compact flash there are better options than knoppmyth. might try looking into minimyth. it might be easier to convert to compact flash boot than myth, and is designed to be smaller than knoppmyth.

Of course I love knoppmyth, but this is simply a case of using the right tool for the right job, and knoppmyth is just not designed to be ultra small and boot from compaq flash.

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

Xsecrets

I'm not sure a network boot is suitable for my needs, but I'm also not sure if I understand the concept correctly:

As I understand it, a network boot involves storing the backend of mythtv on a different PC on the home network. For me, this involves creating a dedicated hard drive/partition for the backend on my Windows PC. I could still store and access media on the local mythbox hard disk. However the mythbox is no longer portable: i.e. I can't take it round to someone's house because it needs to access the backend.

Mini-myth being a front-end only system would also have the same problem.

Is that right?

The reason I was thinking of running the backend and frontend on CF was so that I could easily backup/update knoppmyth: e.g. if 10 people had the same mini-itx system then you could update knoppmyth by inserting a new flash card. Ideally the flash card could be pre-configured to the latest version of knoppmyth and be fully tweaked for the hardware setup.

Is that wishful thinking?

ok here's the problem if you do install frontend and backend on a cf card.

1) it takes up more space, so you need a bigger cf card more $

2) where do you store the recordings? 1hr = 2GB on cf this = Mega $$. just to get a couple of hours of recordings.

edit: and no you cannot run mythbackend on windows period. it does not yet compile on win32.

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

Xsecrets

Have I misunderstood the distinction between backend and frontend? I have a local hard drive in my mythbox (100GB) to store all media on. So I'd leave 60GB (max) for 30hrs of recording, thats more than enough for me, I mainly use the other mythtv features.

I only want to put the actual knoppmyth OS on the compact flash whilst leaving all my media files on the hard drive. That way the OS is stored on a portable medium.

Also, I wasn't suggesting to run mythtv on a windows operating system, just another computer that is primarily used for windows but has a 2nd hard drive, which I 'could' use for a knoppmyth install..... 'if' that's what is required for a 'network boot'.... a network boot being the concept I am trying to get my head round.

So, is the backend where all the media is stored? i.e. /myth/
And the frontend is the rest of the stuff you see in the / directory?
If so, can I install the frontend on to the CF, mini-myth instead?

no the frontend backend is not just directories where stuff is stored. think of it more as client server. In this (admittedly not perfect) analogy the backend would be like say apache storing web pages and files that get served up to the frontend that is like a web browser. And yes all the media files reside on the backend. On a most basic mythtv install the frontend and backend will reside on one pc, however the frontend (this is the pretty interface you see on the screen) requests all the files from the backed which is running in the background as a service. (windows terminology - in linux unix it is a process or daemon)

So if you are going to split the two the backend would have the service running and it would have all the tuner cards and hold all the media files, and the frontend would run on another machine and request the files over the network. And of course you can have multiple frontends connecting to the one backend. In addition to this you can use network boot. What happens here is the frontend machine has no harddrive not compact flash nothing but some ram, and a pxe boot compatible network card (most are these days) and upon boot the network card contacts the backend and the backend gives it the os+frontend to load and run from ram.

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

Xsecrets

aha, much clearer!

thanks

so anyway, how do I mount the hot swappable CF reader built in to the motherboard?

Is there a way to access this CF from the frontend to import pics for mythgallery?