I feel so…. so…. fulfilled.

You may, or more likely, may not have noticed the post below about replacing the HDD in Beastbits. One of the problems that stood out for me after doing that, was resizing the NTFS partition. Cleverly, when I set the machine up almost exactly a year ago, I’d thought nothing of creating a tiny system partition (5Gb on a 60Gb drive). As my system got used, and more (sigh) Win XP updates got thrown at me, that 5Gb soon became a pair of 36″ plastic trousers on my 46″ gut of MIGHT. There simply wasn’t enough room.

Now, in the last post, I mentioned backing up the old 60Gb HDD, seeing as it sounded like it was about to be sick. The Nero DVD I’d created actually included a basic partition manager. That way, I was able to remove the old partitons on the 120Gb drive that replaced it, but not actually resize it. So, once again, I’d be stuck with a 5Gb partition on a 120Gb drive. There had to be SOME way of resizing the partition in Windows.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t. Gah.

Yet, I wasn’t defeated. I fired up google. There had to be something. And there was. And it came, also unsurprisingly in the form of Linux.

You see, Linux is just the fountain of everything good in the whole history of things better than…. stuff. Seriously. It’s not for your Aunt Mabel, but if you know what you’re doing, it’s better than teh secx.

I digress… I downloaded an ISO from www.sysreccd.org and was able to use QtParted to resize the NTFS partition from 5Gb to 30Gb. Woohoo!

So, I now have a reasonably sensible system drive to work with! Now, let’s toss a coin to see if I can be bothered to install SP2…. :)

Short title for a probably scary problem.

I’ve managed to reduce the disk space usage on /dev/hda7 to 38%. The thing is, I’m pissed, and very scared I’ve just deleted something I shouldn’t.

Normally, I can’t get it below 45%. I’ve “backed up” the system logs, but I do that often (well, once every 6 months) and I’ve never had it below 41$, at the least.

There was, however, a 400Mb backup file that had crept in - that’s gone now. But it wasn’t there before.

This is quite scary, as I’ve already killed one linux box tonight.

I’m talking about the PVR Box. I burned a new ISO of the knoppmyth distro, and installed it. It needed setting up friom scratch, and I remembered all of the combinations to get the PVR-250 telly card working again

Then. When everything was working great, I thought I’d fsck it. You know. For a laugh. As you do. It warned me that running FSCK on mounted partitions would cause SEVERE corruption of EVERYTHING. EVER.

I didn’t believe it, and so continued to run it. My “oh” could be heard from 250ft away, as I realiseed it was serious, and because I was logged in as root, no safeguards were in place. The machine crashed specacularly. Instantly, 100% usage on the important partitions.

So, I ran FSCK. What damage could I do? Fuck all, that’s what. Definitely nothing a reboot couldn’t solve. I’m so naive.

It DID, quite literally fuck up the filesystem in every way, shape and form. Kernel panics galore. In fact it was the exact same kernel panic I experienced when I attempted to install it on an unpartitioned drive. Or, at least a drive I’d pursoely sabotaged, then attempted to boot. can’t remember the exact details because I thought I’d never see it again.

I spent most of today learning about mythtv in general. From what I can see, this going to be one hell of qa learning curve. But on the plus side, it’s the first full-scale use I’ve had for a linux box. And, I guess, it’ll start me on the road to learning it full-time.

Either way, if it does, or it doesn’t, it supplied a practical use for an ageing 1.2gb Athlon. This *is* the first ever Linux project I want to get my teeth into.

Following on from the suspected dead RAM in Zippy, it had been sat there, waiting to be tested in another machine. And, as today was a boring Sunday afternoon, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, test the RAM using the PVR box, then actually get the PVR box working.

So, I removed the 512Mb stick in there, and replaced it with the two suspect ones from Zippy. Indeed, MemTest flagged up errors after a few minutes….

(Image lost)

So, the next step was, obviously, power of deduction. I removed one stick, and within a few minutes, Memtest did indeed pick up RAM errors.

So, the faulty stick was removed, and disposed of.

(Image lost)

The other test passed fine, so it was kept.

SO, then onto the PVR box itself. Could I get it working? Firstly, I decided that after all of the changes I’d made, it would be best to start from the beginning. Off went the partitions, and a shiny new set were created. Exactly why it takes Windoze almost an hour to partition and format a new drive, yet it takes Linux less than a minute, remains a mystery to me.

Either way, the software was installed. And after pissing around with the settings for a bit (sadly, I don;t know exactly what I did), it displayed an image! OK, so it was nothing but snow, but finally we had an image. It picked up on the tuner, but if anything, it was going to be used with composite input so I could use it with the digibox.

Unfortunately, the digibox was unavailable. Bugger. What else did I have to hand with a composite output? Yes, you guessed it. Up steps the trusty XBox Of Glory. Hurrah!

So I connected it, ran the set up program to change the active device to Composite-0, and…… nothing. Got lots of audio. But no picture. Sigh. It must be on one of the other 5 composite channels. I have no idea why there’s 5. There’s only one yellow socket on the back. There’s the S-Video socket, but that has its own channel.

Now, either due to a limitation of the software, or my lack of knowledge, each time I needed to change the composite channel, I also needed to reboot.

So imagine my amusement when I got to Composite-3, and still had nothing on screen. With one last selection to choose, I wasn’t holding out much hope. So, One change and one reboot later, it all came down to the last choice. Composite-4. I held my breath while I rebooted. Would it work? COULD it work?

The answer is yes. I let out an almighty roar of delight, as the Xbox logo flashed across the screen.

(Image lost)

So, at the minute it’s “working”. It accepted input from my XBox, and allowed me to pause it, as shown in the picture. I’ve yet to record anything properley using it.

My findings are…

- The Processor and chip might be too slow It looks as if it needs a *beast* of a machine. It’s a 1.2ghz Athlon running at 100Mhz FSB, with 512MB of memory. The memory seems to be enough, but the processor is certainly casing issues

- Hardware MPEG encoding/decoding is a definite advantage. My card only does one of these, and I can’t remember which :)

- Disk space = paramount. There’s a 120Gb drive in there currently, so that’s not too bad I suppose. But more will be better. Even better would be putting a DVD writer in there. I’ll look into it.

- DVD decoding/storing doesn’t work. And I’m going to leave it like that, for obvious reasons!

- It has MAME in it! Get MAME working

- Get TV Output working. The instructions given don’t work.

Updates on it, once again, when and where appropriate

Longest title, for possibly my longest ever project. Bye bye Windowcam, once again. Its latest incarnation lasted a mere 7 days. I got bored of it, and that’s official.

So. What now? I’ll TELL YOU.

A PVR. Oh yes.

What’s a PVR I hear you ask? A machine that records TV programs. Rather like a video recorder. But all shiny.

“Isn’t that what a video recorder is for?” — Say those lines to me and I will personally fuck you with a rake. While technically it is, VHS is such a crap, low quality format, you might as well watch it with one eye closed.

Gonna try and do a catalogue of how I set it up, mainly for my own benefit, but I suppose could be useful to other people, who are, clearly, as mad as me.

I’m surprised I’ve left announcing this for so long.

scribbler:~ # uptime
  7:44pm  up 117 days,  6:21,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.00

Look at that uptime. LOOK AT IT. oh yes.

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