So... since I'm a glutton for punishment, and I was bored... I decided to
upgrade my Intrepid to Jaunty. Given that I didn't want to set up my rig
again, I just did a command line upgrade of the server like I'd done to go
from 8.04 to 8.10.
Naturally that didn't work. At some point the box hung and would NOT come
back. So I set up my rig and tried booting the 9.04 desktop i386 image, it
hung. After a few tries of different arguments on the kexec line, I switched
to the alternate image (the text install).
I didn't have to provide the nosplash or video=vesafb or vesa arguments, the
text based installer went without a hitch. I had no problems. On reboot the
machine came up just fine. Here's what I found:
Sound... "just works". The chip is listed in alsamixer as "Silicon Image
SiI1390 HDMI" but it doesn't seem to indicate that audio over HDMI actually
works.
Wireless... The distribution makes available the new STA drivers which are
binary only drivers direct from whomever makes the wireless hardware. All
reports indicate these drivers work much better than the wrapped windows
version. I haven't tested it myself, but when I was on the desktop, I did
see it picking up and offering me my local networks, so I'm assuming it
works. If you use wireless, this might be worth looking into as the
performance of the negotiation allows for better degraded performance, etc.
Video... I use the HDMI output and it just worked for me after installing
the proprietary drivers (also with the xorg ones, but I figured that went
without saying). The release of the extra 64M of memory worked as before. I
haven't done the underclocking yet because, well I'm not sure how to test if
MPEG2 stuff will crash my stuff. How do I test this? I'd love to know if
it'd a necessary extra step. Is there anything else I might want to test
with the video?
Lirc/IR... I'm not sure if this "just worked" or not... I was having
problems instituting my previous lircd.conf file, so I went through the
process of manually patching lirc and rebuilding. After I reinstalled, it
still didn't work and through a bit of debugging realized that my problem
was that the lircd.conf now wants the path AFTER the "include" statements to
be wrapped in double quotes. Therefore it might have just worked, but I
don't really know yet.
CPU C2 forced state... haven't tried this yet because I'm waiting to see if
the thing crashes on a long playlist like it used to.
Everything else seems to work fine. This release actually fixed a problem I
had before when I used the image from another ATV to install on the one I
just installed. The audio on XBMC would occasionally start to cut out if
starting to play a new video segment.
If you're going from scratch with Ubuntu 9.04 on the ATV, I highly recommend
going with the "alternate" install image for the text install. Yay :-)
-peace
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