Myths, Mirrors, and
Other Meanderings...

Bdale Garbee

HP Linux CTO

Objectives

When you can't decide what you want to talk about, talk about a little bit of everything?

What happens when you mix a mirror and a cache?

Building a PVR using MythTV

Bdale's latest AMSAT project

Meanderings about Debian's role in the world, and things we shouldn't ignore...

Mirrors

The successful attacks on Debian forced me to update my mirroring strategy...

When you work on multiple ports, not having a local copy of sources can be a problem.

When you have lots of systems representing most of Debian's architectures, but very few run more than a minimal development environment, it's amazing how disk efficient a cache can be compared to a mirror!

Run apt-cron on a machine of each architecture and the binary cache stays reasonably well primed.

How about caching binaries but mirroring the source tree?

If you run an autobuilder, you're going to grab every new source package as it gets uploaded anyway...

MythTV

How I'm building a PVR using MythTV, or “that black hole sucking up my time and money in the family room”

Why is Bdale talking about this here?

It's cool

Key MythTV developers use Debian

The easy way to install MythTV is with KnoppMyth, which is of course ultimately based on Debian...

What Bdale's family is enjoying in his absence

Bdale's Dream System

Watch the PVR section of my blog for infrequent updates

Hardware Needed for MythTV

PC – mostly P4 and Athlon systems

Capture Card

Any V4L2-supported TV card can be made to work

Hauppauge PVR-250/350 MPEG2 cards

pcHDTV HD-2000 card

Output

In-a-window or full-screen display on any PC monitor

Composite / S-Video with suitable video cards

DVI to drive an HDTV display

Sadly, nVidia's hideously-non-free drivers are the best at generating HDTV resolutions today, like 720p (1280x720)

Disk Space

MythTV Software

If hacking on a PVR is more important than using one (and/or you have a system other than the one in the family room to play with!), tracking CVS is the way to go.

Most people are running v0.12, as things KnoppMyth and MiniMyth haven't updated to v0.13 yet...

There's a driver called ivtv that supports the PVR-250

The pcHDTV card comes with a V4L2 driver, it looks like any other dumb capture card for analog NTSC, and provides MPEG streams for ATSC (HDTV) signals.

There's probably no faster/better way to start out than with KnoppMyth ...

Bdale's Current Setup

MythTV hardware

Asus uATX motherboard with a fast Athlon, 512meg RAM, 100bT, audio including S/PDIF output

PVR-250 attached to an old Sony DirecTV receiver

80Gb disk

AGP video card based on SiS 315 with composite and S/Video outputs

Infrared remote that came with the PVR-250 card

KnoppMyth r4, SiS driver, updated xmltv

PVR, Weather, Music, Gallery

The A/V stack is built around a Sony STR-DE895 driving an Energy Take 5 surround speaker system.

Primary output is to a Panasonic PT-50LC13

Bdale's Dream System

Master backend box in the basement

PVR-250 for off-air and NASA-TV recording

pcHDTV card for off-air HDTV recording

great gobs of disk space, sitting on the gigE fabric

Frontend in the family room

PVR-250 for DirecTV recording (family wants direct control)

nVidia (boo, hiss!) video card with DVI output to the Panny

DVD and HDTV display without multiple analog conversions

UHF macro/learning remote control

Frontends in odd places

Nehemiah-based ITX boards with CLE266 video core can do MPEG2 in hardware to composite video and audio out cheaply, without fans, and using a wall-wart power supply!

Bdale's Latest AMSAT Project

The Back Side...

AMSAT CAN-Do! Project

The problem is that traditional wiring harnesses suck!

Fairly static once wired

Every module's interface is different

Mass

Incremental Testing and Integration

Critical to our success

Hard to test things that require IHU involvement

Too many tests aren't “in flight mode”

Our solution is a standard module interface based on the CAN bus, with power switch, command outputs, and analog and digital telemetry inputs...

Selected for use on AMSAT Eagle, P3E, and P5A projects!

Meanderings

Linux as Process, not Product

Ian Murdock has been writing about this

Does Fedora mean that RH “gets it”?

Is this the real lesson to be learned back from Gentoo?

Does it really make sense to release “Debian” as a whole?

Communities are catching on...

If you haven't already, go read the Fedora organizational documents, and Bruce's UserLinux manifesto.

Should we be worried that Debian isn't the only community-oriented distribution around? What's our differentiation?

Where should the boundary be between Debian and derivative distributions?

Is it good or bad that Knoppix is a household name?

What does it mean for Debian to be “certified”?

To Learn More

HP

Linux product information at www.hp.com/linux

HP supported Open Source projects (Debian, Samba, etc) opensource.hp.com

Linux for iPAQ - handhelds.org

Bdale's talks all end up at www.gag.com/~bdale/talks

Slide 1

Martin Fink

2003-01-15T08:05:02