• Case: Antec NSK2480, 380W PS
• Motherboard: ASUS M2NPV-VM AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 MicroATX
• Wireless Card: SMC SMCWPCIT-G PCI V2.2 (5V/3.3V) Wireless Adapter – Retail
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620A 400GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive – OEM
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 LE-1620 2.4GHz Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor Model
• Capture Card: Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• DVD: ASUS 18X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black PATA Model DRW-1814BL
• Memory: Crucial 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667

Synopsis

This hardware works excellently right out of the box with Knoppmyth – part of the reason is that I did my homework beforehand. Everything was purchased at NewEgg and arrived promptly and worked perfectly. I found this mix of hardware to be an excellent place to start if you’re looking to build a MythTV PVR. Total cost was a hair under $600, with shipping.

To go through each piece:

The Case – Antec NSK2480

It’s bigger than I thought – about the size of a component stereo tuner. NewEgg has the size wrong.

It’s quality stuff. Good fit and finish, easy to work with, quality fans and a quiet power supply.

The Motherboard – ASUS M2NPV-VM

More features than you can shake a stick at, including:

• Built-in nVidia graphics,
• Many video-out options,
• Paravirtualization support,
• Onboard LAN,
• SATA RAID.

Everything worked fine, and I’m using the proprietary nVidia drivers. The heavy emphasis on multimedia options (and the microATX form factor) makes this an excellent PVR chassis.

Wireless Card – SMC

The SMC has an Atheros chipset and is supported directly in recent linux kernels. I had to use wpa_supplicant to get WPA encrypted wireless connections working.

HDD – Seagate Barracuda 400GB Ultra ATA100

I screwed up and bought an IDE drive – woops. No big deal – it’s still plenty fast enough for recording live TV.

Processor – Athlon 64 LE-1620

This is a low power single core AMD 64-bit chip. I find myself doing more post-processing of video than I thought I would, so if I had it to do again I’d probably get a faster dual-core chip. BUT – this machine idles at 64 watts, so I should save some scratch on electricity in the long haul.

Capture Card – PVR-350

Excellent capture quality – but I had much trouble with the TV-out. It’d work fine for a few hours – then I’d lose red output and everyone would look like a smurf until I rebooted.

So I just started using the TV-out provided by the motherboard – and my problems disappeared. Were I to do it again, I’d either buy two of the cheaper PVR-150s or the PVR-500 to get dual tuners.

A plus – the remote is high quality and works perfectly via lirc. Load is very low during video capture because of the PVR-350’s hardware MPEG decoder.

DVD – ASUS 18x DVD±R Burner

Not much to say – works fine and is darned quiet.

Memory – Crucial 1GB DDR2 667

This is plenty of RAM – after a month it essentially never hits the swap file.

Things I’d do differently

I alluded to some of this above, but:

• I’d get two cheaper PVR-150s or the more expensive PVR-500. TV-out on the PVR-350 was buggy for me, has a low maximum resolution and is handled admirably by the motherboard. More than once I’ve wanted to watch live TV while recording – but I’ve found as my library has increased this happens less often.
• I MIGHT get a faster dual-core AMD processor. It’s not a problem and I’m patient, but for an hour-long show the post-processing for commercial detection and transcoding takes about an hour. Slow, but tolerable.
• You can’t have enough HDD space. I’d get a larger hard drive.
• I would use a standard Debian Etch install instead of Knoppmyth. Now that the system is working the way I want, I’ve realized that Knoppmyth really didn’t do anything I couldn’t have, and I may have saved some time starting with Debian Etch proper. But – if you’re not a Debian zealot like myself, you really can’t go wrong with Knoppmyth.

Notes

I transcode video after recording, shrinking it to about 60% of its original size. I can store 14+ days of TV. ARMAGEDDON, HERE I COME!

I switched the default desktop from XFCE (or whatever it was) to my currently preferred KDE – I’ve got plenty of RAM, and I wanted to use Amarok to stream my music collection from my OpenBSD firewall/router/home server. Sound is piped out through my (somewhat old) component stereo and is excellent.

I do not know what I did before commercial auto-skip. I cannot stand watching TV now without it. Were MythTV made of the blood of innocents, I’d still use it because of commercial auto-skip.

This system would serve as an excellent chassis for pretty much any MythTV system – it’s got tons of room, it’s very quiet and the motherboard gives you a ton of connection options – with excellent linux support (proprietary drivers aside).

When I record, transcode and watch TV at the same time, load averages around 1. Very impressive.

Currently I have standard cable. My next upgrades will be a HD Tuner and HD cable – along with a much bigger HDD and a filesystem managed via LVM.

I am ridiculously happy with this system – it’s changed how I watch TV, listen to music and is worth every penny. I cannot say enough good things about it – and because of prudent hardware choices it was quite easy to set up.

If you’re looking to create a MythTV system, this’d be a great place to start.

A friend had her Dell Inspiron 9300 give up the ghost this week – and unfortunately it had her un-backed-up Master’s Thesis on it. For reals (hey – sometimes apocryphal stories are true).

The symptoms she described to me suggested out-and-out hardware failure, and I expected that the HDD was probably fine.

Luckily, I’ve got an extra Dell laptop (with a broken LCD but perfectly fine CRT-out) that I could pop her HDD into – but for the life of me, I couldn’t get a Knoppix live CD distro to boot.

So I downloaded the Debian / Knoppix based Damn Small Linux. Amazing – Firefox, busybox, sshfs, XMMS, openSSH and a slew of other tools that fit in a 50 meg ISO! You can load the whole OS to 128meg of RAM.

So I fired up Damn Small Linux, had it load to RAM, mounted an NFS export on my OpenBSD server and copied her files off.

I find the fact that you can fit an extremely useful OS into a 50 meg ISO amazing.

Alright. Forgotten by me. Sometimes the extreme coolness that is ‘nix slides right by.

Xnest allows you to “nest” X sessions and can act as both a client and server. I wanted to get remote X connections working to my OpenBSD firewall/router from my Debian workstation. GDM, XDMCP and Xnest to the rescue.

Steps

• Install GDM on the OpenBSD box.

pkg_add -i gdm

• Enable XDMCP in /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. Make sure you lock down port 177! Unencrypted remote X sessions are not safe, and you don’t want the unwashed masses poking around your X server.

#stuff up here
[xdmcp]
#stuff. . .
Enable=true

• Start gdm on the OpenBSD box, and add it to /etc/rc.local.

So we’ve got GDM running on the OpenBSD box, accepting XDMCP connections. Now we need to get the remote host ready.

• Install Xnest on the remote machine.

aptitude install xnest

• Connect!

Xnest :10 -query 10.0.0.1

where ”:10” is some unused display on the host running XDMCP and “10.0.0.1” is its IP address.

You should have a GDM login screen. Huzzah! You can specify a specific height/width via the Xnest’s -geometry option, among about a billion other options. Xnest and XDMCP are both ridiculously flexible. I barely notice lagtime over wired or wireless connections. Very nice.

More Info

• Xnest
• OpenBSD
• Debian

If you use free software, the terrorists have won.

I don’t have a problem with Cuba adopting free software country-wide. Free software means free, for everyone that agrees to play along.

I just wonder about my technological bedfellows when they turn out to be Cuba, Venezuela and China.

Being in questionable company isn’t going to make me go proprietary, though.

So – I bought an HP dv2120us (aka “dv2000” series) laptop. Relevant specs:

• AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-52 (1.6GHz)
• 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM
• 120GB hard drive
• Double-layer DVD±R/RW SuperMulti drive with LightScribe
• 14.1” WXGA high-definition widescreen display (BrightView)
• NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 graphics
• 802.11b/g wireless LAN
• 5-in-1 digital media card reader
• ExpressCard/54 slot

I threw the soon to be released Debian etch (AMD 64-bit RC 2 installer) on it. The short version – with a minor amount of fiddling, this is a SMOKING debian box. Gorgeous screen, great wireless (with ndiswrapper installed) and nice all around.

Installation

ntfsresize refused to resize the windows partition because of supposed errors. I booted to windows, ran checkdisk and ntfsresize was happy after a successful scan and a couple reboots.

Otherwise, the built-in wired ethernet was recognized and installation went as smoothly as can be expected.

Video

I’m running the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the screen is absolutely gorgeous. I’m surprised, as this is a less than $1000 laptop. With the non-free repositories and the 2.6.18-3-amd64 kernel image, installing the nvidia kernel is very easy. Native resolution is 1280×800.

aptitude install nvidia-kernel-2.6.18-3-amd64

Here’s my xorg.conf.

Network

I was not happy about the “ExpressCard” slot – meaning NOT PCMCIA. Barf. I was going to use my Atmel PCMCIA wireless card, but it’s not an option. So I decided to bite the bullet and get ndiswrapper set up, as it would appear there are no free drivers for the built in b/g wireless card.

Installing ndiswrapper is very easy on modern Debian systems, and is described adequately here.

lspci told me:

dv2000:/home/dan# lspci | grep -i broad
01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

so I went to the ndiswrapper wiki and searched for “1390”. I downloaded the AMD 64-bit HP SoftPaq 33008 and used cabextract to get the guts out, installed the .inf and wrote the config out to /etc/modprobe.d/ via the following commands:

cabextract sp34152.exe
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

And add “ndiswrapper” to /etc/modules so you load the module at boot. Wireless networking works perfectly. No dropped connections, excellent range and speed and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Sound

Worked perfectly out the box. No problems.

Other stuff

• The synaptics touchpad works perfectly.
• Hardware monitoring – plenty of info under /proc/acpi, so it looks like all the ACPI hardware stuff (CPU temp, fan speed, etc.) is working nicely.
• Special Keys – They seem to mostly work, I think a lot of the functionality is implemented at the hardware level.
• We’ve got dual CPUs under /proc/cpuinfo. Nice.
• 32-bit crap – I installed a 32-bit etch chroot as described here , skipping all the mplayer compilation stuff. This allows you to run a 32-bit firefox with flashplayer and other proprietary 32-bit apps like Acrobat Reader. You can also run mplayer with win32codecs and libdvdcss2 from debian-multimedia.org .

Not tested

• Webcam. No idea how to get it working and I really don’t care.
• Cardreaders. I haven’t tested them, but etch on another HP machine worked perfectly with them right off.
• Suspend/hibernate. I don’t use it a whole lot, but I’ll probably fiddle with it at some point.

Bottom line

Nice system! Very pretty screen, dirt cheap, fast as all hell with the AMD64-bit kernel and all the stuff I care about – video, networking and sound – works perfectly.

Debian etch is an excellent choice for this machine – module-assistant makes installing custom modules (nvidia drivers and ndiswrapper/broadcom driver) very easy.