Adventures with Ruby

I’ve bought some new hardware for my MythFrontend HTPC. I wanted some more juice for playing high definition movies and using the gigabit LAN. Due to some problems with a webshop I ended up with an extra Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, so all I had to do was buy a motherboard and some memory. I bought a Asus P5E-VM HDMI with 2GB Corsair RAM.

After doing the usual cable origami, trying to fit everything in the Antec Fusion case, without totally disrupting the airflow, it all booted fine. I just love how Linux (Mythbuntu 7.10 in my case) doesn’t really seem to care what kind of hardware I have, it’ll adapt. I just needed to adjust xorg.conf a bit though to use the new chipset. It took my some time to install all the new packages needed, but it worked as a charm eventually. Read more

As a fond user of mythtv, I recently decided to give a clean mythbuntu installation a try. Before I came to that, let me tell you what kind of problems I had after upgrading to gutsy gibbon. I have a server, playing webserver with postfix, courier and dspam, performing the noble task of webserver (as you can see), file server, but certainly not least of all: it is my mythtv master backend. Master being the only backend in this case. I have a sparkling Antec Fusion as a mythtv frontend. Having done a real skinny installation with feisty, I decided to upgrade to gutsy. Problems arose.

It started with my screensaver. It didn’t detect activity anymore from my remote or from playing videos. So I had to press a button or move my mouse every 10 minutes. Second, and I had that problem from the start: samba shares would not mount properly at boot time. I had no clue, neither did any log file. After a kernel upgrade to 2.6.22-14, I could not get my remote to work (Logitech Harmony 525, posing as a Hauppauge pvr350 remote, using a Philips USB infrared receiver; why shouldn’t it be complicated?). Read more