Beulbek

Re-building the linux-based mediacenter: Ubuntu x86_64 + MythTV

The (temporary) final result of my Mediacenter.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was installing Mythbuntu onto my mediacenter. During the installation process, I changed my mind. Although Mythbuntu seems perfect at first site, to me it’s not. Too many packages have been removed and sorting out everything would take me too much time.Mythbuntu encountered issues with the videodriver, the networking gear and the audiocard. Now, I decided to install a regular Ubuntu and install MythTV on top of it. Here’s the steps I took to create my mediacenter, using Ubuntu and MythTV on a Gigabyte GA 73PVM-S2h driven system.

First, get a copy of the appropriate version Ubuntu and burn it on a CD. Ubuntu is freely available for download. You can even get yourself a copy in the mail. Downloads are available here. Remember, don’t get confused by the names: since AMD was the first to produce a 64bit processor, the distributions are called AMD64 for all 64bit systems. Also Intel!

The CD contains a LiveCD version of Ubuntu. This means you can boot your computer from CD without installing anything, perfect to take a quick look around! At the desktop, you’ll find a nice “Install Ubuntu” shortcut. Doubleclick it to install Ubuntu. Took me about 10 minutes and everything was installed.

• Can’t get the CD to boot/install? Try the Safemode graphics boot-option (the second one). This has a better change in producing a nice desktop and recognising your mouse.

After installing, I rebooted to be sure the CD wasn’t needed anymore. A default desktop is shown, as a part of a default system ensuring you have everything you need to get started. Now, finetuning can start.

The motherboard is equipped with a ALC889A sound chipset. To get this up and running, you need to install the appriopriate drivers. In my case, the chipset can be recognised as a ALC882 chipset, available in the backports-modules package.

• To use apt-get. you have to have superuser privileges. You can choose to add sudo prepending all of the commands, or to enter sudo su and enter the commands as specified. Last method is generally not recommended, but it saves some time so I did do it.

The backport-modules package is kernel specific, so you have to find out which kernel is running.
uname -r
# answered 2.6.22-14-generic , so:
apt-get install linux-backports-modules-2.6.22-14-generic


Or just try this:

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-`uname -r`

To load the driver into the kernel, use modprobe. So, copy-paste:

modprobe snd-hda-intel

During all of this, the annoying beep of the system speaker really pissed me of. Therefore, I decided to disable that:

#disable speaker immediately:
modprobe -r pcspkr
# disable the speaker forever:
echo "blacklist pcspkr" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

More coming up. Have to enjoy a Christmas meal now

To get the videocard working, I first looked at the currently used driver. Ubuntu recognizes the videocard as a VESA and my monitor is a Generic screen. Time to update.

My motherboard is equipped wit a GeForce 7100 onboard videocard. Nvidia offers some restricted drivers, which can be downloaded at their site. At the time, 169.04 was the latest version. I used a nice post at Ubuntu-Bits telling me how to install the appropriate driver :

#copy xorg.conf to a backup:
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
# download the necessary sources
apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
apt-get install linux-source
cd /usr/src
tar xvjf linux-source-2.6.22.tar.bz2
#create a symlink to the extracted files:
ln -s linux-source-2.6.22 linux
apt-get remove nvidia-glx-new --purge
emacs /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common
#edit DIABLED_MODULES to DISABLED_MODULES="nv nvidia_new"

Now, hit CTRL + ALT + F1 to open up a terminal session and logon again. Install the driver and restart the Desktop Manager. In my case, libc was missing so I had to install that as well. I answered all questions positively, so I enabled the 32 bits OpenGL and the auto-xorg creation:

#stop gdm
/etc/init.d/gdm stop
#install driver:
cd Desktop
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-169.04-pkg2.run
/etc/init.d/gdm start

Here we are, a working Desktop system. A few other tweaks: to enable networking, I had to click the icon manually and set the network to active. Also, I edited the sources.list to stop APT from using the CD by placing a # at the first line:

#install emacs:
apt-get install emacs21
# edit the cdrom entry in /etc/apt/sources.list to look like this:
# deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release amd64 (20071016)]/ gutsy main restricted

Next step: installing SABnzbdPLUS and MythTV.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 17:22 and is filed under Blog, HTPC, Hardware, Mediacenter, Tech, Testing, Unix general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.