Television, television, television

"The digital life of the digital man cannot be complete without a properly set television tuner and a remote control to switch the things that must be switched."
It is the same case when talking about HTPCs. So we need to buy hardware again, oh dear!? Yeah, and buying for Linux you'll have to look for some pieces of information firstly. The question is: which hardware has the best price/Linux (kernel & sw) support/time to set up/error ratio in the world. Generally this is not necessarily about what vendor to choose but rather the choice of the chip the hw manufacturer uses. Many cards may look different, yet if the chip is the same they hopefully will work well with the linux drivers for the given chipset. But in the case of IR enabled tv tuner that's not enough. The kernel module that handles the chip may not have all the PCI card identifiers enlisted in itself. So you may run into difficulties using the IR part for example. So it's a good idea to read about the chip's kernel module's supported model list. For example the kernel module's source code may help very well - looking for some PCI model constants. All in all I made an acceptable choice going with a Phillips chip based Asus hybrid TV tuner card My Cinema-P7131 Hybrid which eats analogue and digital (not HD) signal too. I need IR control, analogue signal tuning and some later option for digital input. (Of course if you will be tuning HDTV content this is unusable.) saa7134 is the magic module to make it work. (A lot of PCI tv tuner cards works with that one.)

modprobe saa7134, apt-get install tvtime, tvtime, scan for channels! tick-tack-tick-tack... Me content, watching some bullcr@p on TV. :-) Wait, we have an IR control, let me try it...okay, that was a harder thing. I'll go into details later...

CPU heat

Running the system means heavy loads not so rarely on the HTPC. So I considered it of high importance to test out thoroughly the CPU's temperature / system load relation - especially because by default I didn't put any kind of ventilation into it. The occasion come quickly: not much time passed using the system when I felt the necessity to build my custom kernel to be able to have the latest patches and bugfixes of the kernel tree.

I was compiling the latest kernel available at kernel.org and soon it turned out that unventilated CPU's temperature can climb up slowly to a top that's not really healthy on the long run - ~60+ Celsius degrees core temperature. The maximum recommended operating temperature of a dual core AMD is 65 Celsius degrees. I had to put the process into background with Ctrl+Z and let the system rest for some minutes and then use 'fg' command to get it back running. With this method I managed to compile it without risking the CPU's health.

Next day I decided to look for a final solution for the heat misery. The decision was to buy 2 case fans of 12 cm diameter and think out where to put them in the rig. I went for a cheap but silent solution called GlacialTech Silent Blade 120 Case fan Black. I thought I will have to fix them onto the case. But in the end remembering the review of the Thermaltake Sonic Tower I just tried to merge the passive cooler and the fan. (I put away the second case fan.) It was easy, the passive cooler had the screws and the metal part already in the package. A thin screwdriver helped to complete the operation smoothly. Gave it the 12 volt power cable and power on! Let's see what it does! Wow, it was just superb! The CPU temp started at 25-27 degrees and pumping the unit with heavy load could only make it climb around 40-45 degrees in the core of the processor. Yes, that's what I was in need of... One 950RPM ventilator with a 15 cm high passive CPU cooler tower + passively cooled motherboard + fanless PSU... the most silent and safely cooled PC I've ever put together. :-)

Shaping the Vanilla

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon up and running! Whoa! :-) I've put the thermal applet to the gnome panel and traced the temperature. It seemed OK, starting at ~28 and raising to around 40 Celsius degrees with normal/low load on the system. I said, great, let's start to shape things into a Linux multimedia desktop and server.

Let's take into account the goals now:

• Test hardware/kernel relation further - especially CPU temperature under bigger load
• Install the TV-card with the IR control with the kernel drivers
  
• Install/configure ssh server accessible from other boxes
  
• Install/configure the apache web server
• Install/configure mythtv - the big deal
  
• Configure NFS - network file system for my linux based systems
  
• Configure Samba - to access files from Windows based machines
  

The third and fourth task was an easy one running apt-get install where necessary and edit the configuration files in /etc to my taste and this doesn't really need a focus in this blog. I'll go into details about the other points here later...

Installation of the Operating System + HDD

So the machine is put together. I plugged the HDD of the old P3 server onto the IDE cable and thought to try if it booted with the new mobo. The OS on the HDD is an Ubuntu Dapper Drake beta which was running for 1 or 2 years already. Switched on the HDD spun up and the boot loader started. After a few seconds it run into the (un)expected kernel panic. :) It was about APIC, it couldn't recognize the new hardware and told me to boot with no APIC. I did that and the machine correctly boot up. Almost. Reaching the X11 was a failure. The nvidia 7050PV was a no-go for the nv and the binary nvidia driver provided with the Dapper Drake too. So I decided to reinstall the whole thing right after buying a new SATA HDD.
Choosing the Hard Disc Drive I considered to go for the less heat pumper and most silent one. I've already heard good things about Western Digital being the least hot and most silent by the rumors. So next day I bought a WD SATA2 400GB, latest model. I think 400GB will be enough for the TV recording for a good leap of time.
So I have the OS - Gutsy Gibbon - already downloaded and burnt onto a CD so nothing prevents me from a short period of installation...Done! :-) It boots perfectly (no APIC problems) and installing the nvidia binary driver resulted in a perfectly running X11 with compiz. The kernel was so fine that I could run gnome thermal applet to monitor CPU temperatures and of course the forcedeth driver was outstandingly working with the integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller too.

The CPU Cooling + RAM - make it boot!

One of the biggest noise maker in a PC is the CPU cooler if it is a normal one. Generally it runs around 1000-2000 RPMs or more depending on the CPU's temperature. (The other one is used to be the ventilation of the PSU which is now eliminated by chosing the fanless PSU FSP Zen 300W. I hope you can find one such PSU in your country too.)

Now that I have bought the CPU (AMD64 X2 4200+) I can calculate based on it and plan what kind of CPU cooling to buy. Considering that dual core AMD's recommended maximum operational temperature is around 65 Celsius degress it's not an easy task to complete. Looking around on the network for reviews on silent CPU coolers available at my local hw stores I've found this review about some of the passive CPU coolers. I've found some others as well that convinced me that I should go with Thermaltake Sonic Tower revision 2 (that can handle 4 different CPU slots, luckily the AM2 too). Reviewed as an excellent heat sucker I purchased one for around 8000 HUFs (~$38). Now it's time to put together those nice things: case + PSU + CPU + passive cooler!

It wasn't a big thing, I had to swap the original plastic base with the newly provided and fix the cooler onto it, after putting the CPU into place. Note that there's an option to add a 12cm ventilator onto the cooler with some brackets and a little piece of metal provided within the package of the cooler. The PSU unfortunately didn't fit into the house so I have to put it into another corner of the case. Not nice, but working properly. :-)


Yes, after that I added 2x1GB of Kingmax 800MHz DDR2 RAM to the system, dual channeled... (256MByte given to the shared memory of the video card)... oh, push the button, and yes! The system boots and starts! But what the hell? I cannot hear any sound except the nonexistent click of the monitor turning on! :-) Yes, that's very nice, I thought...

Central Processing Unit

Yes, when talking about this I should keep in mind that this needs to be a well planned purchase when the OS is chosen to be a Linux and the GPU is an nvidia chip. Why? Because I want to play high def content plus there's a certain big performance needed to quality encodings and Linux nvidia driver lacks Pure Video for playback and also I don't plan to add dedicated encoder. We live in the digital age, don't we? :-) Other thing to care about is that I should try to go for an energy saving, low-heat CPU because the machine will be mostly switched on 7/24 - all day and night. So if you look at official recommendations, you will find that 1080p/i (1920x1080 resolution) content really needs a powerful processor. Around 5200+ in terms of AMD. Yet I've decided to go with an AMD 64 X2 4200+ Energy Efficient. Reasons: it eats around 65W officially has two cores, a silent machine may need less heat to burn, I only want to play mostly 720p contents and as a matter of fact I've always been an AMD buyer a fact that is strengthen by the fact that the given motherboard only supports AMD CPUs. ;-) And yes, it's rather cheap (16 thousand HUF ~ $94 at this time). Also I am expecting to have an nvidia driver with Pure Video support for h264 and mpeg4 someday which will fasten things and lighten the burden of the CPU...well hope dies last. So to sum up things I've bought an 4200+ dual core... It's operational temperature is around 20-60 Celsius degrees with a maximum recommended core temperature of 65 degrees.

Choosing Linux distro

The choice was between two linux distributions. I was thinking about using Ubuntu Linux or Gentoo Linux (which is the one on my home desktop machine). Ubuntu is based on Debian package management, while Gentoo is using source code compiled package management written in Python (emerge). Gentoo is flexible and I like it much, yet the choice is now using Ubuntu Linux for the HTPC. On the previous installation (the replaced Pentium3 server) was already using Ubuntu Dapper Drake. This time I decided to try this popular linux distro as the basis - to provide more useful information for one big mass of Linux users out there. So this time I download Ubuntu Linux 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon console installer CD...

The first pieces of hardware

So we have three elements in the system that're fixed:

1. the motherboard - AN-2MHD
   
2. the PSU - FSP Zen 300W
   
3. the PC case - an old noname ATX house

The motherboard has no ventilator cooling on the chipset so that's a good base for a silent PC. It's said that it can well run without any cooling that's not already on the board vanilla. This motherboard is rich enough in features for my taste and the needs of a HTPC. Let's see: it has HDCP compliant and HD resolution capable HW accelerated (but shared memory) nvidia video chip integrated (nvidia 7050PV). It has a HD audio chip (realtek ALC888) integrated with 7.1 channels plus optical SPDIF output. It supports AMD AM2 processors and DDR2 RAMs (4 slots dual channel! important because of the shared memory of the video card). It has Gigabyte network, 4 SATA-2, 1 IDE 2 PCI slots. So ideal for video content, high speed processors, the dual channel can help out the video card's shared memory, can handle great amounts of storage room with high speed.
The PSU has also no ventilator on it, and is a quality PSU, said to give stable power.

The case is a bit inconvenient for a fanless PC, but still we can modify it later on...

Here you go, shot of the mini ATX board inside the case:

Project Goal tempered by me

Gee, the goal seems to be a one that's hard to reach, so I must temporarily (maybe for a long time) modify the ziel of fan numbers from 0 to 1. The reason is that I currently do not own a PC Case that can dissipate the heat of the passive CPU cooler well enough.

Bits of hardware - the beginning

All has begun with a good old Pentium III PC that I was using as a server in the storage area of the flat. When moving its place became obsolete and I had to put it into the living area. Thus the story started... I had to take care of the noise which mainly came from the old PSU's fan. I looked around at the market and found that I can easily purchase a fanless and noiseless PSU that gives around 300 watt power sufficing the needs of the good ol' P3. And yes, FSP Zen 300W was really the one without a sound! Using it for some weeks it turned out that the story will continue... a passively cooled integrated HD capable motherboard came into view: the Abit AN-M2HD!

Project Goal

Hey, people!

This blog is written to record the history of the creation and tuning of my home theater PC. What may be special about the effort is that it will be totally

1. Linux and open-source based and will
2. Not contain under any circumstance fans.