Difference between revisions of "Generic PC"

Revision as of 23:50, 24 April 2008

Preface

When you use LinuxMCE and you have more than one entertainment area in your home, you have to setup a separate Media Director for each of them. The main function of a Media Director (MD) is management of multimedia content (such as Live TV, DVD, and photos) and the display of that content on the TV. An MD has a built-in onScreen Orbiter. You can control your home using it if you connect a monitor with touch-screen to it. (I'm not sure if it is possible to watch TV and display the Orbiter at the same time, however.)

Hardware

Any generic PC can be used as an MD. There are a couple recommendations. The PC used should support PXE to enable it to boot from the tftp server. This is needed because LinuxMCE curretnly allows the addition of diskless MDs only. Another issue is the video adapter. I tried to setup MD with an S3 Trio 64+ video card but without luck -- when X started up during the bootup of the Media Director PC, the monitor turned off. After replacing the video adapter card (nVidia recommended) it started working correctly.

Basic Hardware Requirements: RAM size?, Processor? For use of the Media Director PC in a HomeTheater PC setting, a Celeron processor and 512Mb RAM is usually enough. More important criteria are that the PC is quiet and there is small emission of heat.

Setup MD

Network booting of the PC which is going to be Media Director is easiest. It will boot from the Core server. To do this, make sure the BIOS is set for network boot. That way, every time you turn on your Media Director PC, it will try to boot from the Core server on the network.

The first time you connect a Media Director PC to the network, the LinuxMCE Core will auto detect it. You will then see the network boot commence on the screen of the machine you are adding. After a short time you will see a message in yellow text stating that this machine has been "announced" on the Core. Go to the Orbiter with the 'Add Media Director' screen displayed and you will see a screen asking if you would like to add your PC as a Media Director. If you choose "Add as Generic PC" (which currently is the only devices type choice) then LinuxMCE will start the process of adding your PC. The process of adding a PC to LinuxMCE takes at least 20 mins or more, depending on the speed of your Core, on whatever other tasks it is performing at the time, and on your network LAN speed.

The alternative manual process described below should no longer be required. In fact, it can cause problems with the auto detection process that is always looking for new hardware, which can get confused when a new Media Director machine is added manually.

Well, let's see how-to setup a new MD. First we have to add a new MD in the LinuxMCE-admin site. Do to that go to Wizard --> Devices --> Media Directors. On the MD page press the button 'Add device'. In the new window chose 'Generic PC as MD' and press the button 'Add device'. After that you will see a message about preparation a data for new device. It can take 2-4 minutes. When setup procedure of the MD is finished you'll see a message on all active Orbiters that new device is configured and ready to use. The field 'IP Address' should contain IP address given by DHCP server. This IP will be assigned to PC when it starts to boot. Type MAC Address of your PC in the field 'MAC Address' (it'll be displayed when PC tries to boot from network). Now it's time to prepare ISO for new diskless MD. To do that just press the button 'Setup Diskless Media Directors' and wait till operation will finish (you'll see a log output to the web page):

Quick reload the router and boot MD. In my case (I have 64bit Core/Hybrid and 32bit MD) it took about 2 hours. So, it's better to setup MD before going to bed :)

Troubleshooting

Problem: Diskless MD cannot find ISO. Solution: It's possible that DHCP gives IP which is different with IP from MD properties. Change IP manually (you can see real IP in the /var/log/pluto/PlutoDHCP.newlog), run setup diskless - press the button 'Setup Diskless', wait when setup finishes and quick reload router.

Problem: Display of MD goes down after boot. Solution: Something wrong with MD video adapter. As I mentioned above I had the same problem with S3 Trio 64+. When I replaced it MD on-screen Orbiter loaded successful.