To boldly go where ....

It's been a while since I wrote anything HTPC related. The reason is that I set up the HTPC as best I could, but I didn't own a HDTV. Until last Saturday (29/05/2010) when I got a Samsung 40" LCD. However after 6 hours out of the box, it breaks. :( :( :( One of the panels started distorting the picture. I'm in the process of sorting out a replacement.

However it does give me something to try out the HTPC on. Boot it up, and lovely XBMC appears. Some config tweaking and voila, full HD playback.

All is not well though.

I did a portage upgrade and amongst other packages the ati-drivers got upgraded to 10.5. Now I have a problem with XBMC hanging when I push stop on the remote. I've posted to the XBMC forums if anyone has any ideas. I tried downgrading to 10.2 but got blocked (see this forum post)

While investigating the above issue, I also found (IMO) a borked ebuild for XBMC for xbmc-9.11-r4. I had 9.11-r3 installed and I thought upgrading to 9.11-r4 might fix my blank screen problem. Seems 9.11-r4 has a dependency on Python 2.4, when the rest of Gentoo (at least on my boxes) is using 2.6 Looking into this it's because the XBMC scripting engine is 2.4 based. There's a Gentoo forum post on the matter. Why the ebuild is borked is because (from the associated bug report)

If I understand the problem correctly, than its not a matter of the python-version. Xbmc has made a few patches/additions to python, which aren't upstream. The included python has this patches, python as an external library misses this features.

So putting a dependency on an external 2.4 python interpreter WONT EVEN FIX THE PROBLEM

What should be done is to incorporate the suggestion made by comment 12 in the bug report into the ebuild. As comment 15 pointed out, having an external python 2.4 interpreter will fix somethings, but not everything, where as using the bundled interpreter with XBMC will ensure all plugins working (as far as the infrastructure is concerned).

I updated my xbmc-9.11-r4 ebuild and it built fine. Doesn't fix my XBMC hanging problem though.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Ah the joys of tracking down documentation, help, and that tiny bit of information that makes it all click :)

I got a base Gentoo Linux install onto my HTPC box, with kernel version 2.6.31 That was the easy bit. The hard bit is figuring out how to get my video card drivers running.

Gentoo is great with the helper guides it provides, and if any doco writers read this - keep at it. The Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide and The X Server Configuration HOWTO guides have been very useful. However there are a few things to note that weren't apparent to me straight away; and that I burned some time away on. The first is the keyword differences between the propriety ATI drivers (from here on referred to as fglrx) and the open source drivers. Two are provided 'radeon' and 'radeonhd'.

In Gentoo to specify the drivers for X, you edit the VIDEO_CARDS property in your /etc/make.conf However adding radeon and radeonhd will get you the open source drivers. Pretty obvious now, but without knowing how the keyword fglrx aligns to my Radeon 5450 video card, I went down the wrong path for a bit. Easy to recover from. I updated the kernel to rip out all references to video card drivers, and DRM. I unemerged all the unneeded x11-drivers packages and updated the VIDEO_CARDS flag to contain fglrx vesa. The vesa keyword is handy for a plain old backup driver. Ran an

emerge -vDNu world

and all is well. To make sure that the fglrx module was loaded at boot, I added fglrx to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

The next problem came with trying to get X running. Can't watch those DVDs without it :). It's nice that the writers have added in the relevant steps for getting HAL working with X (the Xorg package in particular). When I first upgraded to Xorg 1.6 on my laptop, all the input devices stopped working, and Xorg 1.6 passes the management of that stuff to HAL. I guess I'll have to be careful when that all moves into udev.

Running the

Xorg -configure

command didn't work. I kept getting this error.

(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance
(BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found

After some searching on the Gentoo forums I found this helpful post outlining that

Since your using the ati-drivers , don't use Xorg -configure , you
want to run 'aticonfig --initial' ... That will set up
your xorg.conf the way fglrx needs it.

So ATI couldn't play nice and do things the same way the rest of the community does it? I ran it and got a basic xorg.conf I'll have to do more work to polish it off, but I'll soon have X running (I hope).

I got thinking to myself, why should I bother with the propriety drivers since there seems to be a decent community around the open source version. Maybe I should ditch fglrx and go with radeonhd. Alas I don't think I can. According to Wiki the 5450 uses the Evergreen chipset, and it seems that the radeon and radeonhd drivers aren't there yet; which I can understand given that the chipset is new.

Now all I need is to get X to work on the TV properly and I can move on to XBMC.

So you want that new Video Card

Something I'm planning on doing is making my own home theater PC. I've also got some code that takes a while to compile so I can double the box as a massive compiler to make use of those extra CPU cycles. My old man has recently upgraded, and I got his old box. However he decided to keep his video card. I've been looking at the Radeon 5450 since it's been getting some great reviews as a HTPC card.

However I'm planning to use XBMC as my front end, on a Gentoo Linux OS. So I need Linux drivers. Are they listed on the AMD drivers page. Nope. Does googling around find them. Nope.

I did find a review of the card which was benchmarked under Ubuntu. So after some posting on the forums turns out that the Catalyst driver bundle will work with the card.

I have yet to buy the card, so I can't say for sure. But I do feel a lot more confident now.

Oh and AMD - please actually update your release notes when you put out new cards. If it's not in the release notes under the supported cards section, then how are consumers meant to know other than trial and error.