Been a while since I’ve posted. Guess I haven’t really had much to post about. I’ve been trying to build a new MythTV box, but the Dell Precision 8100 I have won’t boot with the kernel that’s currently out for Fedora Core 6; of course, that’s what all the current drivers require. I might try MythDora to see if that works reasonably.
Work has been busy as usual. My manager seemed a bit surprised about the spike in service calls recently (fairly typical end-of-semester). I think I’ve been pretty good about juggling projects but I really need to push and get my current major one done.
I think the house is as decorated as it’s going to get for Christmas. We didn’t have to secure the tree with fishing line this year! Amazing what a level floor will do, eh? I noted that one of the side effects of the house layout is that our tree isn’t visible through windows from the road side of the house. Oh well. Maybe we’ll have lights in windows next year for people to look at. We finished up our Christmas shopping on Wednesday. liz4jc4ever is of course curious what I got her and I’m really looking forward to her opening it.
My brother-in-law John is up visiting this weekend so we can try and get his new computer up and running. It’s a custom machine that started with a barebones kit. I *think* I’ve figured out what’s been giving him grief. The first part was apparently the Windows installers didn’t like having two gigabit NICs and sound cards (one each on-board and in PCI slots). After pulling the “extra” cards, the Windows installer got slightly farther, but I suspect it can’t deal with his fancy video card (nVidia 7600), so we’re going to go into work today and borrow a PCI video card since I don’t have any of those laying around to try. Hopefully that resolves things.
I saw on /. that there’s a new version of MythDora out. I may try it out. I really want to get the firewire to my HD cable box working (have you done that? If so, got any notes? The stuff on the ‘net isn’t the best.). Since I have a spare 160GB SATA drive (old windows drive from the machine), I thought I might try a fresh build & still have the old one to fall back on if things blow up… Also, MythDora uses Myth 0.20 and KnoppMyth (my usual choice) is still on .19. Can MythDora be used as a LiveCD frontend? You can do that with KnoppMyth, which is cool. I’ve been tempted to go to a diskless frontend but that won’t work if I get the firewire stuff working…
About your brother-in-laws computer. Disabling the onboard stuff in BIOS didn’t work? I’m a little surprised about the video card but not completely shocked. Surprised because they’ll usually work as a plain old vga card until you can get the right drivers installed. Not shocked because newer hardware can be a bear sometimes.
Anyway, good luck with the Myth and setup projects. I’m curious about MythDora, so if you play with it this week, let me know how it goes. I’ve got a couple weeks off coming up and I may give it a try, if you get good results.
There does appear to be a LiveCD of it, but it’s 2.32 rather than 3.1. I am keeping our current box configured until I get the new one working… might have to get more RAM for it. The Precision 8100 is one of those evil machines that uses RDRAM (PC800) and it only has 256MB… might see about looking around on eBay to see if there are any decent sales on it.
From what I hear maybe you don’t want to bother with FC6. I hear it is problematic.