Revision as of 23:08, 8 November 2010

Some 12 years of Debian experience might be enough to start useng LinuxMCE, just not much experience in editing wiki's

Started this project recently and assembled the following hardware:

Hardware

core

• MoBo: MSI 770-C45
• CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 620
• RAM:(4GB) OCZ Platinum Low Voltage OCZ3P1333LV4GK
• CPU cooler: Scythe Mugen 2 Rev. B
• GPU: Club3D 9400GT HDMI Passive.
• HD: 3x Samsung EcoGreen F2 EG HD154UI, 1.5TB
• PSU: Nexus NX-5000 R3 530W; nice and silent if only the case fans could also perform that silent.
• Case: Chieftec CA-01B-B-SL, a bit big, but lots of space for air circulation
• TV-card: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-4000

Media Director

• MoBo: MSI 770-C45
• Case: Silverstone LC17
• CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 215
• CPU Cooler:Scythe Ninja Mini Rev. B
• GPU: Club3D 9400GT HDMI Passive.
• PSU: Nexus Value 430
• Infrared Tranceiver: IguanaIR

Orbiters

• Nokia N800
• Nokia N810

Issues encountered

It is pretty modern hardware in comparison with Kubuntu-Intrepid, so I suspect some mods and tweaks are nessecary to get things running.

IguanaIR

First add the IguanaIR repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

 deb-src http://iguanaworks.net/downloads/debian source/
 deb http://iguanaworks.net/downloads/debian binary-i386/
 deb http://iguanaworks.net/downloads/debian binary-amd64/

(Since MCE is 32-bits only, the last line is actually not necessary) Then go to a clean directory

(for example: sudo mkdir /usr/local/src/Lirc;cd /usr/local/src/Lirc) And issue

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install iguanair
sudo apt-get build-dep lirc 
sudo apt-get -b source lirc

Kernel: MoBo NIC & GPU

The on-board NIC (RTL 8111/8168B) is not supported by Intrepid's native desktop kernel. The first homebuilt kernels (according to http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu: How To Compile A Kernel - The Ubuntu Way.) got this card running out of the box, but in all my from-scratch kernel configuration attempts, the NVIDIA kernel driver was broken.

I then copied the config of the correct operational Maverick Meerkat distribution kernel 2.6.35.4 to the source of the ditto kernel and forged a new kernel package from that.

The NIC is supported (easy) and the compiled NVIDIA (v260.19.12) kernel driver appears to be loadable. Upon MCE -installation I suppose this will be automagically replaced by the nvidia distribution package.

installation MCE alpha-2

• 2010 07 29: installation of current mce 810

( wget -c http://deb.linuxmce.org/ubuntu/new-installer-latest.tar.gz wget -c http://deb.linuxmce.org/ubuntu/new-installer-latest.tar.gz): The installer started complaining it could not dld some packages which I initially downloaded manually. At the third missing package I dived a bit deeper into it and added the line

  deb http://deb.linuxmce.org/ubuntu/ intrepid lmce-alpha2-updates to /etc/apt/source.list which was enough.