Hi, all. I recently bought an HP eVectra on eBay for $90 for my second front-end. I figured this would be a very cheap solution - cheaper than my XBox front-end. It's a P3-933MHz with 128 Megs of RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive.
It's not something I would use as a general purpose computer because it has limitations: no PCI slots at all, for example. However, for a MythTV front-end, they aren't needed. It's VGA-out only. So it can only be watched on a monitor, or with a VGA-to-TV converter (which I have). If I can get this to work, it seems like it would be a great low-cost front-end in general for anyone else that is interested. It is very small form factor, very quiet (it has a separate power-brick rather than an internal power supply). Not totally 100% silent the way a fanless machine would be, but pretty darn good. It seems like it should be a perfect machine for a MythTV ffront-end to sit by a television: cheap, small, quiet, but of decent power. Here's one on eBay right now currently at $99.99 if anyone is interested: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51119&item=5155161019&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW However, before you buy, you may want to read the about my problems getting it set-up: I decided to try KnoppMyth first (R4V5). I didn't do an install, just tried to run the front-end from the CD. However, KnoppMyth apparently couldn't recognize the built-in videocard because once it got past text screens onto graphical screens, it was unable to drive the display, and the screen was completely garbled. So next I tried Fedora and Jarod's guide. My back-end was easily set up this way, on FC2 (thanks, Jarod!). I decided, after seeing some apprehension on this mailing list, to stick with an FC2 install on the eVectra, rather than FC3. Install was fine, and Fedora doesn't have the same display problems that Knoppix had. I installed at 640x480, since my VGA-to-TV converter can only do overscan adjustments at that resolution (although it can convert all the way up to 1024x768). MythTV menus are much snappier than on the XBox. Watching Live TV from off of my back-end worked fine. Watching my recorded TV did not. I got a blank screen but with audio okay. I searched on the mailing list (and the net in general) and it seems that memory or video memory was implicated in the problem. I switched the display to 800x600 to test, and now Live TV had the same problem (blank screen, audio only). I switched back to 640x480, and changed the Myth TV GUI size to 320x240. Success! Now I could see both Live TV and recorded TV. However, running at 320x240 is obviously not a solution. Thinking that I could reduce in-use resources, I tried installing IceWM to use instead of KDE. No help, there. I was able to get IceWM running with no problem (a lot to say for a Linux novice like myself), but I still had the same problems in Myth. The eVectra has 128 megs of memory. My XBox only has 64. Now, I know the XBox has "shared video memory" - does that mean it uses main memory? The eVectra uses Intel 810E integrated graphics with Direct AGP and "Dynamic Video Memory" - I'm not sure if that's the same thing or not. It seems to me that if my XBox can run a MythTV front-end, this machine (which has a better CPU and more memory than the XBox) shouldn't have any problems. One thing I've thought of doing is using a completely different distribution, like Debian. And perhaps using a window manager like blackbox, the way myth-xbox-0.4.4 does. i.e. basically I want to set it up exactly the way my XBox is, thinking that if the XBox can do it, so can this PC. Can anyone suggest anything else before I do this? Or can anyone shed insight into whether or not it will even work? I can upgrade the memory of my PC to 256 megs (an eVectra is supposed to be un-upgradable, but I did find a website explaining how to upgrade memory) but it seems like it shouldn't be necessary. Thanks in advance for any help. David
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