My old media box was dying of cruft. After several years of repeated upgrades, repeated breakage, indecisiveness and having pretty much every package I liked the sound of installed, I decided to start with a clean install, using less awkward and less power-hungry hardware.

Getting something halfway workable didn't take long. Mythbuntu makes it so easy to get MythTV up and running. And then there's just a bit of tweaking to do. It's the just a bit of tweaking that I think warrants further study, It's been interesting living with MythTV and the way it's changed the way I live, so I'm going to keep a diary of the tweaks and swearing related to the new box.

The old media centre has something of a story to tell though. It started out as a headless fileserver known as Marvin, running Gentoo and being something of a repository for extra hard drives. It's just so much easier to have the vast libraries of music, video and whatever else a houseful of {scifi, tech, anime, music, roleplay, LARP} geeks collect, stored on a separate machine running NFS and samba. NTFS support under linux was pretty awful back then, ext{2,3} support under windows was somewhere beneath 'panic' and 'hope someone has knoppix' on our list of emergency procedures. Marvin was an 1100MHz Duron powered abomination, and whilst a nicely tuned Gentoo* install made the best of the limited hardware, maintenance had to be timed carefully, as recompiling the system took a long time.

At some point just after Breezy Badger (5.10) was released, we had some kind of problem that broke the gentoo install and as I had a Breezy disk on the top of the pile of interesting stuff, Breezy was installed as a stopgap measure. At some point shortly after, we realised that having a GUI on the box, which lived behind a sofa in the living room, meant we could watch videos. This quickly became the fastest way to piss people off, as xine (via totem) and the on-board graphics lack-of-accelerator seemd to hog all available cputime. A quick disk-cloning and a donated Athlon 1300 and GeForce 4 MX later, and we were able to watch stargate DVDs in the living room and actually bothered socialising when the net connection wasn't down! An old 21 inch SGI monitor (of the cathode ray tube and very very heavy variety) was spotted on it's way to a skip (tr=dumpster) and being slightly bigger than our TV, it quickly became part of the media centre.

Fast forward to Dapper, and someone traded a Hauppauge DVB Nova-T (Digital terrestrial TV card) for a bunch of network cables, and as we'd just moved house and I couldn't convince my WinTV USB DVB-T card to work with an indoor arial any more (it used to run plugged into my windows box), I decided to give MythTV a try. An evening of swearing and I had it all plugged into the roof aerial and once again feeding my news 24 addiction.

A few overheating and performance issues later I swapped out the motherboard and CPU for an Athlon XP2000 and swapped the case for something bigger and better, an old Chieftech Dragon Midi-Tower, and the box took the name of the case, Smaug. The WinTV USB card was disappointing, so I added an HVR-1300 card, which works really well apart from this bug in Hardy, which is easily fixable. The Motherboard was swapped again, this time for a dual socket board with a pair of Athlon MP2000s.

Smaug

Over the years, Smaug became increasingly used as my development web server, backup storage, occasional desktop PC during shadowrun games where the only way to maintain a character sheet is OOCalc/Kspread (or similar), and due to various holy wars ran KDE3, KDE4, Xfce and Gnome desktops, served as a NIS/NFS4 server for several diskless browser boxes, and over the course of 6 different version of ubuntu the cruft built up. Hardy was the death-knell, it developed the annoying habit of crashing every time someone tried to use samba or burn a dvd. I think PAM and AppArmour got too crufted, and I got so annoyed at having to repair the database after every crash I decided to trim things down a bit.

My 'new' media box uses a rescued Dell Precision 360. It's less powerful than Smaug running a 2.4GHz P4 and 512MB of ram, but it's really stable. I don't think I've managed to crash it without resorting to Vista... The on-board USB and Ethernet save valuable card slots, and as it has a pair of SATA connectors, I don't need the extra IDE controller card. I've swapped the Nvidia Quadro graphics card for old GeForce as the Quadro is DVI-only. Maybe when I get a better tv the Quadro will return. I've got 2 PCI slots left, possibly for a better sound card, possibly for another TV card, or more likely for an extra network card, so I can retire the firewall. In an attempt to be green I'm trying to cut down on the number of idling systems that can't be turned off, and trying to use PCs that use less power for said roles.

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* Gentoo is an amazing distro for the curious. It's package manager builds everything from source, and it's easy to build customised packages. Being able to strip a server of all support for X, for example, is a difficult feat when favoured editors have optional graphical modes, unless you have an easy way of recompiling from source. It's also an incentive to keep a system lean, as a toolchain upgrade means rebuilding everything.