Re: [tlug] Ubuntu / EPIA / Media Player

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Hi,

	Before this thread ended up becoming something that looked like a 
mini-diatribe on Linux's dmesg output and why I miss my *BSD let's see 
if we can get back to the original topics...

Curt Sampson wrote:
> So, I spent some time this afternoon installing Ubuntu 7.04 on my little
> EPIA box, in the hope that I can turn this into a media player. Some
> questions:
>
> 1. Is it running KDE or Gnome? How does one tell, in general?

	I think you figured this one out already by clicking on the equivalent 
of the Windows start menu.  However, there are other ways to tell 
whether it's KDE or Gnome.

I'm in Gnome if
---------------
o By default for Ubuntu (assuming you've not mucked around and nuked 
MetaCity) has two panels on its desktop.  The top panel handles the 
functions of the Windows Start button and quick launcher while the 
bottom handles showing all active programs in the current workspace.
o Gnome for Ubuntu uses a brown-ish theme so you should easily be tell 
just from the color selection
o During startup the splash screen should tell you this.  If you're that 
concerned with kernel outputs you should be watching the splash screens 
too since it does have some sort of useful information on all the 
unnecessary processes it's firing up.
o Go to Ubuntu's website and look at the pretty pictures [1]

I'm in KDE if
-------------
o Ubuntu's KDE flavor which is called Kubuntu chooses a blue-ish theme 
by default.
o Once again the splash screen's should tell you
o There's a 'K' in the where a Windows 'Start' button should be
o Match it up to screenshots on Kubuntu.org [2]

	Frankly, I'm surprised you asked this question since it should usually 
take about 5-10 seconds to figure this out and far longer to compose an 
email mesage on it.   If you look at some screenshots various distros it 
should all be clear.  After suffering through playing around with most 
of the desktop environments I can usually tell in 1 second unless I'm in 
a Redhat-based one.

> 2. The graphics chip is a Trident CyberBlade/i1. What's the best
> approach for starting to play with full screen video output on this, via
> either the S-Video connector or at 1280x720 on the VGA output (which I'd
> send directly into my projector)? Is there some clever tool, or should I
> just get to hacking on the X11 config file directly?


	If you want to use the S-Video connector my experience with graphics 
cards is that this seems to be done around POST before your poor 
Operating System has even had a chance to load.  Plug the S-Video 
connector into some TV or monitor before even turning on the switch or 
else spend a long time wondering if the drivers for your OS of choice 
support redirecting the output to where you need.  While we can go into 
a long rant about this and how the drivers 'suck', it's far easier to 
just remember to plug it in to the right connector port properly.

	Once you've established which particular output port you're going to 
use.... you _should_ let Ubuntu's video detection during install handle 
the issue of resolutions and all that other gunk for you.  If Ubuntu 
fails to detect it (happens but in my experience the number of times it 
happens is far lower than) usually you have to muck with the resolution 
in xorg.conf but I'm finding that is becoming increasingly less common. 
 You're also in the out of luck category if your driver wasn't detected 
and Ubuntu decided to use vesa or vga or whatever.  However an Epia Ezra 
based CPU seems rather old and I would expect it to  be properly 
detected.  If not, just swap out the driver with the proper X11 one. 
Are you sure your driver isn't the unichrome or via one that are 
available as xserver-xorg-unichrome, xserver-xorg-via (not installed on 
my desktop by default)?


> 3. What do I want to be using to play movies, music, etc? I installed
> the MythTV package, and the music player accessory for it, but it
> doesn't seem to give me any options beyond recording and playing back
> television, which is the one thing I don't need to do, at least at the
> moment, and configuration of MythTV seems cryptic, at best. Is there an
> easy way just to aim it at a directory of media and make it play it?

	MythTV's core functionality is to be a PVR.  Once you understand this, 
things become an order of magnitude easier easier to deal with for 
MythTV.  So think PVR + extensions to 'do things multimedia'.   If you 
don't need video recording I would suggest skipping MythTV altogether 
unless you really like its interface (I happen to).  Most of the options 
for MythTV are directed at a power user setting up a PVR which is why 
you're suffering a lot.  And yes, the docs do suck but there is at least 
one book on MythTV [5], [6] so if you want some more guidance on what it 
can do I'd suggest going there.  I own [5] and found it moderately 
helpful although I wish I had the book before I already suffered 
figuring out the first 10 or so chapters on my own.
	If you're really bent on using MythTV, I'd suggest installing the 
mythvideo  package which should pull in mplayer and provide the ability 
to playback video formats.  Once you install the mythvideo package there 
should be a menu option to choose a root directory for where you keep 
your multimedia files.
	Don't forget to install w32codecs and whatever other codecs you use if 
you're going to be playing back multiple types of formats.  If you're 
one of the anal / lucky types to have all your formats in one format 
then you might be lucky.

	You might want to consider looking at Freevo as someone else suggested 
as its main purpose is to be a video playback center sans PVR functionality.


> 4. I'm going to be running the thing headless, but I'm thinking it would
> be nice to do a remote-desktop kinda thing on it. What's the best way to
> set this up, do you think? Let it run the default desktop on the VGA,
> and remote into it and share it? (I noticed some KDE thing for this in
> the packages.) Set up a separate vnc X11 server without a real screen,
> and use the vnc client on that? Log in remotely somehow? The first two
> options would seem to have the advantage of being able to disconnect
> from that session when I wander off with my laptop and reconnect later
> on when I come back, which seems as if it would be nice.

	What do you mean 'headless'?   You just asked in a previous question on 
how to make this a multimedia player which means you do need this device 
to output to a screen/TV/monitor/projector which implies you already 
have X11 running.  Unless you're seriously entertaining the thought of 
using the framebuffer device only (driver support for doing anything 
besides running console looks lacking even today) you're not running 
this thing headless.  I guess the problem is from the the terminology of 
headless.

	Maybe the better question is 'how can I manage this thing remotely?' 
I'm going to assume this is your question.  In that case you have far 
more options:
1. Login via SSH, grab some X11 cookies and muck with your desktop
2. Run x11vnc on login to the already established desktop and manage it 
from there
3. Run a seperate VNC server
4. Try using the default remote desktop sharing (which is usually a VNC 
frontend) from your Window Manager of Choice

	I'd suggest option 2 and bind the vnc server to localhost and SSH 
tunnel if you're that paranoid about someone wanting to watch your 
Simpsons episodes.  I don't like Option 4 that much as the vino server 
on gnome is a memory hog and also I've seen instances where it would 
just hang for no reason other than it was having a bad day.  Perhaps the 
KDE version of its remote desktop is better but I'm not that optimistic. 
Option 3 sounds dumb as you're wasting resources for a GUI session that 
is mostly disconnected from the GUI you want to be looking at.  I'd play 
with Option 1 if I had time but I imagine since you're an old school 
UNIX guy this should be rather straightforward.  I'd appreciate some 
pointers as my memory is rather rusty on all that stuff :-)


> A few impressions, while I'm at it:
>
> 1. It's very resource intensive; it really crawls on an 800 MHz VIA CPU.
> It's probably doing a lot more stuff than my typical NetBSD setup (where
> I use fvwm2), but it doesn't feel anywhere near as snappy.

	I'm going to be a little harsh here.  Well.. duh.   Gnome and KDE are 
not what I think almost anyone here would consider 'lightweight'.     I 
certainly don't.   How much memory is on this box?  I can't stand 
running KDE or Gnome on anything less than 512MB of memory (and even 
then it's still pokey).   In my experience the CPU and its L2 cache and 
whatever gee-whizzes tend to not matter.  What matters is how much 
memory you've installed on that machine.  People have suggested Xubuntu 
which is an XFCe based desktop.  I've had mixed success with it as I've 
seen it load like a dog on a Toshiba Libretto L1 and on some old Compaq 
Armada *mumble mumble*.  I'm not sure if it was Xubuntu at fault or xfce 
but I didn't have the patience to bother and run fluxbox now.

	I imagine you probably have 256MB of memory in that thing in which case 
I'd suggest you immediately trash KDE or Gnome and go back to fvwm2 or 
try fluxbox or any of the other 'tiny' window managers and add a hook on 
your desktop startup to run mythtv/Freevo/Curt's Own Media Player that 
doesn't Suck.


> 2. The dmesg sucks: it's hideously verbose, gives you a lot of crap

	You have a few options:
1. Rewrite your own version, compile MyOwnKernel and hope you never need 
to upgrade
2. Try doing this whole exercise on your favorite UNIX flavor and find 
all the annoying Linux-isms in the packages you're trying
3. Deal

> 3. No ssh server installed by default. Is it just me, or is that getting
> fairly silly?

	For the desktop version of Ubuntu, no I don't consider it silly.  For 
the server version I consider it a chore but I can deal with this.  It's 
only about 20 keystrokes away...  'apt-get install ssh'.

	As some concluding remarks.  Like others here, I think I've spent a bit 
of my personal time scanning for / trying to build that famed media 
player tool that will JFW.  I've come to the conclusion that if you 
really want no muss or fuss buy Windows Media Center.
	If you're bent on not-Microsoft (I am but not because I hate Microsoft) 
all of the options end up requiring fiddling one way or another.  Most 
of the Japanese devices support only a few formats for playback and/or 
have some rather lame assumptions on working in a home network which I 
frankly don't want to put up with.  The Linux-based ones ALL require 
tweaking because of some reason or another.  Since you probably will get 
hung on...
1. X11 configuration
2. Desktop configuration
3. Media playback software configuration
4. lirc configuration
5. How do I remotely manage this configuration
6. I want a web interface configuration
7. Where did the docs go for one of the above? There isn't even a FM to RT
8. Hey wait, I can't get it to work with MY hardware...
9. I did all of the above and it doesn't even  support the FOO media 
format....
10. Oh gawd, it does work but it's slow....

	If it really is no-fuss [7] I'm sure they're selling it and making 
money off of it somehow.  If you really assumed this all 'just worked' 
in Linux your assumptions were really off.  Try back in 2020.  But I DO 
believe that the # of integration steps to get a decently behaving media 
playback machine tend to be less in Linux than other UNIXes (except OS X)

Alain

[1] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/getubuntu/releasenotes/704tour
[2] http://kubuntu.org/screenshots.php
[3] 
http://www.linitx.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=154&sid=647ce4ad658f78f2c55d0883709d0685
[4] http://www.mythpvr.com/mythtv/
[5] 
http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-MythTV-ExtremeTech-Jarod-Wilson/dp/0470037873/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1408408-3317737?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178665183&sr=8-1
[6] 
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-MythTV-Building-Media-Center/dp/1590597796/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-1408408-3317737?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178665183&sr=8-2
[7] http://www.tivo.com/