eMachines EL1300G-02w – HTPC with MythTV on Linux

Executive Summary: The eMachines EL1300G-02w is a good choice for a low power home theater PC (HTPC) or media computer. Pros: Small form factor, low energy use, low noise with stock fans, DVD-DL R/W +/- optical drive, lots of media card readers. Cons: 160GB stock HD will need to be swapped out for back-end use, VGA video out (only), Analog Audio out (only), minimal expansion capabilities.
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Setting up lircd with the hdhomerun and a Tivo series 2 remote

To set up lircd with the hdhomerun to see a tivo series 2 remote control, you should first program the HDHomeRun to send UDP packets to your linux computer with a command such as the following:

hdhomerun_config <device id> set /ir/target "<lircd ip addr>:<port> store"

You can test that this is working by running:

irrecord -H udp -d 5000 "testing"

If you get dots when you press your remote control buttons, the HDHomeRun is sending IR information to your linux box. (remember to unblock UDP port 5000 for incoming transmissions if you are running a firewall!)

Once that is working, just set up your /etc/lirc hardware.conf and lircd.conf files to support the Tivo series 2 remote.
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How to move a mythtv database from one machine to another

Backup the database on your source machine. Newer versions of mythtv do this for you automatically. Check out the mythconverg_backup.pl script if you have to do it manually.

Delete any existing database on your destination machine:

$ mysql -u root
mysql> DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS mythconverg;
mysql> quit

Re-create the empty database on your destination machine:

$ mysql -u root < mc.sql
(You may need to use the -p option and enter your root password)

You may also have to set up the mythtv user with the correct password:

$ mysql -u root < mc.sql UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('YOURPASSWORDHERE') WHERE user='mythtv'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

After this, run the mythconverg_restore.pl script:

mythconverg_restore.pl --filename mythconverg-1214-20091010150513.sql.gz

You may have to specify hostname, database name and enter the password if you don’t have a mysql.txt file set up in my .mythtv directory. You may also have to specify the fully qualified path to the file if it’s not located in your default backup directory.

How to add XBMC to MythBuntu 9.10 (or Ubuntu 9.10)

Xbox Media Center is no longer for just the XBox. It’s UI is slicker than MythTV’s Frontend for playing music, videos, and showing slideshows of pictures. (It’s weather applet is also much nicer…) If you have an existing Ubuntu 9.10 based system, the PPA:team-xbmc repository makes it dead easy to install xbmc on a ubuntu computer with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc
sudo apt-get update

MythBuntu doesn’t support AutoIP

MythBuntu (and Ubuntu I assume) don’t support the AutoIP standard.
(Auto IP is basically a way for devices to form ad-hoc networks…if you don’t have a static IP, and are not assigned a dynamic IP via a dhcp server, you try out a random address in the 169.254.x.x network (255.255.0.0 netmask) and as long as ARP doesn’t report a conflict, you now have your IP!)

Windows, and the HDHomeRun devices support this, but MythBuntu 9.10 does not. So, I’m back to using firestarter to easily configure my MythBuntu box to assign the HDHomeRun an IP address via DHCP.

Discovery Error 4001 : Silicon Dust HDHomeRun error

SiliconDust HDHomeRun Discovery error 4001I was in the process of changing out my MythTV backend machine, and when configuring the new machine, I took a look on SiliconDust’s website for a firmware update for my HDHomeRun (HDTV Network tuner box). I hadn’t updated it since late 2008, and sure enough, they were five or six firmware versions farther along. (Up to 20091024 to be specific.) So I upgraded the box using the newest version of the hdhomerun command line utility under linux. Everything went fine until the HDHomeRun rebooted. After that point, the utility said that an error occurred discovering the HDHomeRun! I tried booting into windows to try out the windows software, but it also could not discover the device, and gave me this ominous message:

Discovery Error 4001: Please email support@silicondust.com
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Running Ventrilo under Wine in Ubuntu Linux

Wine will install and run the ventrilo VOIP client very well. To get this working, follow these steps:

apt-get install wine wine-dev msttcorefonts

download ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe

run “wincfg” to prepare things

run “wine ventrilo-3.0.5-Windows-i386.exe”
(go through the install, using all the defaults)

Now, everything works with one quirk.
Push to talk works only when the ventrilo window “has focus”
This is somewhat understandable, but annoying, in that you have
to focus the ventrilo window before you can talk.
The other option is to use voice-detection, but that takes up a bit more cpu-time, and you may accidentally broadcast something you don’t want to.

A program that listens for keypreses and directs them to the ventrilo window fixes this problem:

http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/
http://np1.pp.fi/ventriloctrl/ventriloctrl-0.3.tar.gz

To compile it, you’ll need xorg headers:
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev

Aiptek HyperPen T-6000U tablet with Ubuntu 9.04

Getting the Aiptek T-6000U tablet working with Ubuntu 9.04 was relatively easy, following the directions here.

Summary:
Install the xserver-xorg-input-aiptek package.
Add a file called 10-aiptek.fdi to the /etc/hal/fdi/policy directory containing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">

      <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true </merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>

      <merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Ubuntu 8.04 SSH login slow

SSH Login to my Ubuntu 8.04 machine was slow. (It would delay about 5 seconds after I issued the ssh command for the remote machine to request a password.) I believe this is because the remote machine is on my home network, and I have set up it’s hostname using host entries instead of having a true DNS name.
I edited the /etc/init.d/sshd_config file and added the single line:
UseDNS no
which fixed this problem as soon as I restarted the SSH server, with
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart