Home Theater PC

This Friday I bought a new PC to be used as my Linux Home Theater PC (HTPC).
  • ATX 480W
  • Slim HTPC cabinet
  • VGA 512 GFORCE 8500GT, PCI
  • CPU Intel Core 2 DUO E6750
  • DDR2 1GB 667 Kingston
  • DVD/CD DL Samsung
  • Gigabyte GA-P35K - LGA 775
  • SATA 500 Gig HD (Western Digital)
  • Gyration Wireless 3d Mouse and Keyboard.
I tried using the beta of Linux MCE, but it didn't work at all (video problems). I used an older version of Linux MCE and got it working a bit. But I didn't like the fact that it picked it's own name for my machine and user name. I gave up on that and am now using the 8.04 alpha (yes alpha, I never learn) of Mythbuntu.
Mythbuntu worked reasonably well out of the box except a lot of the configuration screens didn't fit my 480P. The OK or Next button would be off screen and I couldn't figure out how to move the window up so I could see it (Alt+Drag with the mouse is the trick).
Other problems I had was that Myth defaults to hiding your mouse cursor so you can't see were you're clicking (there's an option to turn that off).
I realize now that Linux MCE works well with a 3d mouse, but Myth works expects a remote. So I have to use the wireless keyboard for now until I figure out how to better configure Myth to be like Linux MCE.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to need another 8 hours of playing around to get it working the way I want. After that I'm going to hire an electrician to pass the relevant wires up and down so that it all looks nicely organized.
The computer needs to be a little more silent, I may have to buy another, more expensive, power supply since that's the loudest thing in the computer at the moment. Also playing with the various settings for controlling the fans should help a bit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shortest Sudoku solver in Python

Mark Byer's site has some more Sudoku solvers here's a short one in Python that's only 178 bytes long: def r(a):i=a.find('0');~i or exit(a);[m in[(i-j)%9*(i/9^j/9)*(i/27^j/27|i%9/3^j%9/3)or a[j]for j in range(81)]or r(a[:i]+m+a[i+1:])for m in'%d'%5**18] from sys import*;r(argv[1]) On the site is also shown a longer Perl version at 185 bytes: use integer;sub R{for$i(grep!$A[$_],@x=0..80){%t=map{$_/27-$i/27|$_%9/3-$i%9/3&&amp;amp;amp;$_ /9-$i/9&&($_-$i)%9?0:$A[$_]=>1}@x;R($A[$i]=$_)for grep!$t{$_},1..9;return$A[$i]=0} die@A}@A=split//,<>;R I think the Python version is slightly easier to understand, although they are both quite cryptic. I'm not sure why I find these programs fascinating. I think it reminds me that any program can be written in such a way that it's cryptic, even in Python. In addition, the code is small enough that you should be able to figure out how it works, and may learn something the process. Related is
Read more

Seven Segment Display in Inkscape

Image
Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't handle
Read more