James' Tech Blog

Just poking around Chromium pages (you know “Google ChromeOS”) and found some interesting stuff. They have a page about building the OS http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/portage-based-build First the URL says it all Portage based build. Later in the page they have emerge-<board_name>. Then about ebuilds and their chromium-overlay.

Does it actually use Gentoo? I’m not sure what their overlay has, but it seems like they are using Portage to build and maybe some Gentoo patches along the way. Check out the part about dependencies. It clearly has eselect ebuilds and gentoo-syntax for vim. Also, core-utils with -vanilla USE flag (as in include Gentoo patches). Why use Portage though? Especially since the user already has a working system and can install missing dependencies. Why not use Paludis? Well Google isn’t the only ones to ever use Portage in their project. I believe Openembedded’s bitbake is Portage based also.

Anyways, way to go Gentoo! Helping the world reach a brighter tomorrow!

Searching continued for watching Live TV with Hauppauge HVR950Q and mythtv… Found mythtv mail-list post, from yesterday, about xc5000 and not being able to watch Live TV. My initial suspicions were correct. Firmware was taking way too long to load, supposedly about 7 seconds! That causes time-out and Live TV fails. I guess the timeout for recording is high enough that recordings work. When I set up the card initially I ticked the box to “Open DVB card on demand”. This means that when the backend isn’t using it the card is in “power off”, the tuner is not on, amber light is off, device is free for any program to grab it. Sounds great then if I want I can use mplayer to watch streams and the card will be off most of the time. So the solution is to untick the box. This loads the firmware when mythbackend starts and the card is left “power on” so that the firmware is only loaded once and not every time the backend wants to use the card. Good fix for now, but I might try tweaking the timeout settings so that I can retick the box. I’ll add an update for what I find out. Other good news, I successfully recorded 2 streams on the one device the other day. It seems like comcast has a large amount (over 10) of streams at 83.X so I should be able to record a lot of streams at once. Awesome!

On a separate note I was doing some updates and my xorg got screwy. At first it wasn’t working at all, after reinstalling ati-drivers and rebuilding xorg, banging my head on the wall, it worked. QT is messed up though, when I start mythfrontend fullscreen the screen is totally corrupted video playback is corrupted. Tried rebuilding mythtv to no avail. If I “mythfrontend –geometry 1438×898” it is almost fullscreen and not corrupted at all. Again, I’ll update when I find something out.

So I got a Hauppauge HVR 950Q cause Comcast is supposed to be switching to all digital in the very near future. That means my wonderful PVR 500 will become horrible obsolete, though it has served me very well and I wish I would have gotten it sooner. I had made sure that it was supported in Linux before I bought it. It wasn’t horribly difficult to setup, but I’ll add some links here and some tips.

It is a DVB (digital video broadcast) device though it has an analog tuner. A quick look at linuxtv.org shows that it is supported as of kernel 2.6.26. Furthermore, there are nice instructions on their wiki. All I had to do was enable dvb and the xc5000 in the kernel, I made them modules cause then I didn’t have to reboot, extract some firmware and voila! Not! It turns out that the kernel version of the xc5000 I was running complained about the firmware version. Specifically, dmesg was spitting out errors close to:

xc5000: waiting for firmware upload (dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw)…

And then complaining that the file could not be found. Bummer, where was I supposed to get firmware 1.6.114? Shouldn’t the linuxtv wiki have a link to the newest firmware? Maybe steventoth has it on his website in the xc5000-untested directory? The answer to all of these is No. Well, except the first one and the answer is: http://www.kernellabs.com/firmware/xc5000/dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw Apparently, the guys at Xceive says it’s okay to distribute the binary firmware! Awesome, no more extraction scripts.

Next step, scanning channels and configuring mythtv. Sidenote, my database is still screwed up so I’m still running 0.21, thanks Gentoo! So, I went to their wiki and searched for Comcast. It seems that somebody has hashed all this out already here. Download the scte65scan tool and follow the instructions. Namely, do the scan and look at the output. I had 2 VCT_IDs 3013 and 0. 3013 seems right according to the wiki page and 0 just sounds weird. This should give you an idea of what channels you have available. Next go to schedulesdirect.org and setup a new lineup or edit your current one if you have been using a digital box/analog capture device. Using the output from scte65scan select the correct channels. Now, I could be wrong about the exact order here, but you need to know the sourceid for the new lineup. So, setup the 950Q in mythtv-setup and select your new lineup as the source. Don’t worry about channels we do that next. You need the sourceid because the scte65scan outputs sql code that includes the sourceid so if you set it incorrectly you could screw up your analog channels, from a different “source”.

Drop into mysql:

~# mysql -u mythtv -p

use mythconverg;

select * from videosource;

If you have given your new source a nice name like “comcast-digital” it’s easy to see that the new sourceid=2

Next rerun the scte65scan using your VCTID and -f3,2 because my sourceid=2 if yours is 5 use -f3,5. The README file that comes with scte65scan explains most of this. Oh, right you did “mysqldump -u mythtv -p mythconverg > myth.backup” right? Good. Now we have an sql file that has all of the channel info we need. Following the instructions bring it into your database. That should be it, run mythfilldatabase and all should be well.

I have no problem recording channels, but when I try to “Watch TV” it doesn’t tune. I think it might be that it is trying to tune a frequency that doesn’t have a channel, but I have tried after I recorded something so the frequency should be right. Mythtv kinda remembers what frequency/channel  it was last set to or more likely the hardware is still set to that frequency. Anyway, mplayer can play the dvb stream no problem so I can watch “live-tv”. I guess I’ll save that mystery for another day.

Updated link for 1.6.114 firmware. Thanks Devin!

This is my first post. I’m starting things off on the geeky side.

Well I’m mostly going to start by documenting my Asus EEE 900A here, but I will probably put some personal stuff too. Not to mention gentoo stuff and general hackery. Right now I’m unemployed so I have a lot of free time.

So, there is a ton of info out there about the Asus EEE line. My favorite related website is eeeuser.com started by someone called “ant”. I’ve been trolling that sight since I first heard about it which was before the line was released. There of course is a couple Ubuntu variations out there, but I’m not one for Ubuntu. What’s the plan for the 900A then? Well put Gentoo on it! I have been doing some research and it should be straight forward, but since the 900A has an Intel Atom I either have to do some trickery with gcc-4.4 or go all out with gcc-4.5.

So, what’s the overall plan?

* Setup a uclibc chroot environment on my 2.5″ external HDD that way I can use my Athlon 64 X2 5000+ to do the initial  setup and updates, but then have the chroot environment available to the EEE simple by plugging in the HDD. This should work pretty well, but I’m worried about the kernel setup and I might do that native.

* Use some hints from Tiny Gentoo to get a “clean root” without all the cruft of gentoo, like portage, just have the stuff to run the programs I want to run. Use a 8GB SD card for the “clean root” and setup grub to boot to it instead of using the BIOS to select the boot device. Hopefully save myself some headaches with grub.conf

* Setup a dedicated “home” partition so that I don’t have to rsync or something silly like have multiple instances of config files and the like.

* Use LXDE cause it looks awesome and LXLauncher should look very similar to the “Basic” mode that comes with it.

* In general try to install the least amount of packages as humanly possible.

Planned hardware upgrades:

* 8GB SDHC card

* 2GB DDR2 800 SODIMM, yes I know you’re wondering if the bus speed is right.

Possible hardware upgrades:

* HP DV6000 webcam, the 900A doesn’t come with one and I’m pretty sure it compatible

* Touch screen interface, cause that would be awesome

* New SSD cause 4GB should cut it, but I could get a much faster SSD and have room for all my partitions without needing to use SDHC

* Do some internal mods cause the touch screen is going to add some internal USB ports