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.