Building your own media box, part 2
Jan. 4, 2004
As promised, here's part 2 with the software configuration.
The Software
I used Gentoo 1.4 for the OS, only because that is what I use on all my other PCs. The installation process went flawlessly. Hotplug detected all my USB and firewire ports. The Gentoo installer detected my network card. In the interest of getting started right away, I didn't bother doing an emerge sync. I simply used the new genkernel utility to configure and compile the kernel.
When I rebooted into my new kernel, I noticed some problems immediately. I couldn't install the driver (8139too) for my network card, despite it working on the install kernel. After browsing the gentoo forums, I found that for some reason ACPI interferes with the 8139too driver in recent versions of the gentoo kernel. After recompiling my kernel without ACPI support, the network card worked.
X configuration (using the savage driver) was another hassle. The network card seemed to work fine, but the crappy monitor I was using for configuration couldn't seem to handle anything better than 8 bit color. Finally, in my frustration, I tried simply hooking the box up to the TV instead of a monitor and to my surprise it looked great. I haven't bothered to find a configuration that lets it work on the monitor.
Loading the sound driver was also a problem. Apparently, the via82xx driver is buggy with the 2.4.20 kernel. After updating to 2.4.22 and hacking the alsasound startup script (it wasn't finding the right driver to load), everything worked nicely.
Now that all the components were working together, I started to install MythTV and its associated applications. I installed blackbox as a window manager, only because it was small and I found a script for it that would let it boot straight into Myth at startup. A few emerges later (and 3 hours of compiling) everything was ready to go. I tried out some DVDs with MythDVD and a few other video files with MythVideo. No problems there. MythWeather also works great. MythMusic crashes on startup and I haven't had a chance to look into the problem yet. I haven't tried the emulators yet, since I'm still waiting on some Playstation to USB controller adapters.