Difference between revisions of "User:Rperre"

Revision as of 16:20, 12 September 2009

Introduction

I am a Helicopter Instructor Pilot with a wish to automate our home, linuxMCE seems to be perfect for what I want to do in our house. I'm fairly new to Linux, but learn quickly, I have some experience with programming from my college years, and always tweaking stuff to make it work better/easier. Our house is a 1 floor setup with an existing Nutone intercom and an old Alarm system we do not use at the moment, I will integrate these systems into my setup as time goes by. We have 4 Bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, Kitchen, Livingroom, Playroom, Office, Pool area that I would like to provide this system with. Initially the Livingroom, Playroom, Kitchen and Office will be added and than I will expand as time goes by and I found the right "pnp" hardware. Master Bedroom and Bath are next, than we'll go to the patio for outside entertainment.

CORE SETUP

As I had a lot of hardware "laying around" from my computer upgrading spurts I have every other year or so, I decided to gives this setup a try.

Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Deluxe

 Socket A with a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ installed
 Memory at 1Gb PC3200 (will upgrade to 2Gb, still have a slot open)
 2 Internal NICs, 3COM, and nforce (forcedeth) both 100Mb max, need upgrade internal Nic to Gb.
 Audio is an ALC650 with 5.1 output

Videocard: Axle Geforce 7600GS

 512Mb of memory
 AGP8x

Storage: OCZ core2 SATA II 60Gb SSD

Drive: Generic DVD-drive

Power supply: ANTEC True430P

Case: old generic case which is overheating, will go to an ANTEC full tower for space and enough cooling

NAS

 Mvixbox with 2 drives for a total of 1.5Tb
 Simpleshare with 250Gb for daily use on our home computers and backup of Core image

INSTALLATION

Ubuntu 0810

This Asus motherboard has 2 Sata connectors and hooked up the SSD to the Primary and made sure the jumper was set to enable SATA, installation was no problem.

Video, Sound and drive are all up and running.

Network needed a small tweak, the nforce 'forcedeth' seems to want to add a different MAC for this card each time you start up and increases the eth# accordingly which messes things up for the internal network (i'm using this nic for internal), you can get past this by editing the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net-rules. Delete all lines past eth1, leave the eth1 line and make it look as follows:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="forcedeth", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTRS{device}=="0x0066", NAME=="eth1"

You can find your vendor and device ID by looking in /sys/class/net/eth#/device.

This will "lock" your nforce NIC to eth1. After this edit I had no problems with my network cards.

LinuxMCE 0810 alpha7

Followed the wiki for the latest alpha installation

It worked OOTB, but... to get the video to play smooth you have to install the latest nvidia drivers, 185.18.14 at the moment I write this. After this everything played nicely with UI2-alpha blending.

Follow the display drivers wiki for installation of latest drivers.

CM11A X10 controller

I had a box full of X10 devices in my garage from a previous attempt to automate the house, I have integrated some table lights in the system.

Hauppauge PVR500

NAS Mvixbox

MEDIA DIRECTORS

Got two Zotac ION ITX C-U boards, connected one to my LCD TV and set it up for PXE boot, booted up just fine. I followed the ZOTAC wiki and chose UI1 at 1st boot. Installed the Avanard Repo 180.60 nvidia drivers, I got a opengl error, had to manually set the xorg.conf to 'nvidia'. After this it started up great in any resolution. Going to try the newest nvidia drivers on the other board, nvidia 190.18

Setup my second Zotac ION ITX C-U board, connected it to our Sony Receiver that is connected to our DLP TV and set it up for PXE boot. After image was done, I had a "Failed to setup X" which is normal since i used a HDMI cable to connect, i manually set the driver to vesa and could go through the AV wizard this time, used UI1 again for first boot and it worked. This time I installed the Nvidia 190.32 drivers and re-ran the AV Wizard. Somehow i would get a blank screen when selecting "1" (HDMI/DVI), but "3" (Component) worked, strange but it works fine in 720p now.

I will try 1080p when my Gigabit switch and nic for the core comes in.

Got the boards at Newegg, they had them with a $25 rebate att, great deal for these great boards.

The only thing I always see, is that you have to restart your MD completely after the whole installation is done. You'll get a grey screen otherwise. After restart everything is fine.

Still waiting for full vdpau integration, but it seems to do great in all resolutions.

Also looking at other possibilities, especially cheap but performing for e.g. the bedroom TV's that don't require 1080p, I can't see the difference anyway between 720p and 1080p. But if it's possible it will be fine and future proof.

ORBITERS and REMOTES

Currently using an old Palm TX and my laptop with the Web orbiter, but will expand to gyro remote and/or WEBDT 366 as time goes, not interested in the bluetooth capabilities. The Palm TX does not work, it constantly goes to the lighting floorplan and stays there, haven't troubleshoot this much, and will when i have time.

Bought a windows vista MCE remote, this was plug and play with mceusb2 selected, mceusb will not work with these vista remotes.

I am also very interested in the 2440 all in one boards, which would be perfect to put in place of the current intercom system for fixed orbiters around the house.

LIVING ROOM AV GEAR

TV: 65" Hitachi DLP with a max resolution of 1080i 65SWX20B

STB: Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HDC

RECEIVER: Onkyo SR606

DVD: Sony 5 disc multi DVD player DVP-NC665P

SPEAKERS: All Bose with the 701's up front 301's in the back and the VCS10 in the middle, still have to get a good powered SUB or amplify our current passive one.

All of these have an IR connection in the back for control.

I have learned all IR remote codes and these will be submitted to the sqlcvs database.

PLAYROOM/HOME THEATER AV GEAR

TV: 47" Philips LCD TV (max 1080p) 47PFL5432D/37

STB: Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250HD

RECEIVER/DVD: Sony 5.1 all in one Home Theater System DAV-HDX265

I have learned all IR remote codes and these will be submitted to the sqlcvs database.

Working on

Trying to get the IR control to work correctly, just playing with some settings when i have time.

All in all it's not very difficult to setup, but it does require some reading and searching the forums/wiki/web for answers, especially when you are a linux noob like me.