Luckily I'm "only" in for a new rim and tire, and some alignement.

Sorry for the poor picture quality, I took that one quickly with the cell phone just before going to the garage. What you see is a good size dent in the front left rim and a serious rip in the tire.

So what happened? I'm used to that turn, to go to the daycare, and it's usually a nice turn. However I made the turn too sharp too much in advance and I realized I was heading towards the divider, so I tried to correct and it looks like I was almost there since I barely hit it with the side of the rim. Even so it was quite a shock, I even immediately stopped on the middle of the bridge to see how much of the front bumper & wheel was still intact -- that's how bad it felt.

And a while ago I "shaved" another divider with the left rear rim & tire:

One of the good things is that by today's standards I do not need anything powerful for MythTV. I already have an Hauppauge Win-TV PVR 150, all I need is a PSU, a CPU, a mobo, some RAM and a video card. I have all the rest, including a 300 GB SATA Drive. I want this PC to be silent so the main goal is to get an XClio 450 BL for the PSU (I have one in the linux server and its nearly silent and cheaper than a SeaSonic.) For the CPU, I'm in luck, the minimum these days is an Ahtlon 64 3200+ which comes in 90 nm and I don't want to overclock it so it shouldn't be too hot. For the video I selected a GeForce 6200 TC with 128 MB -- first because I like the fact it doesn't have a fan, and to display 1024x768 it's just fine. Also I read lots of good comments in MythTV forums (people use it to display HDTV, heck I just need NSTC on my old 19' RCA!) and finally it's the cheapest stuff you can find in PCI-E. Add an ASUS A8V-E SE and 512 MB of Corsair DDR 400 and we're done.

Amusingly this is dirt cheap -- half what I paid for my 3000+ config two years ago yet a tad more powerful and the CPU is a 90 nm instead of 165 nm so it should dissipate less. I just finished installing all that yesterday and I'm really satisfied. If it were not for the front led I'd hardly know the PC is turned on -- The ASUS A8V-E has a Q-Fan thingy that automatically reduces the CPU fan speed. And contrary to the Epox crap I got last time, this works right out of the box with no pesky fan on the southbridge nor dying onboard LAN (note that I am equally satisfied with the ABIT NF8-V2 I got for the server.)

Now back to the MythTV side. The install of KnoppMyth on the HD was still good so I didn't touch that. Sound worked directly, no issues there.

Next issue was that live TV was not working. After a while I realized that by default myth-setup had recognized an anonymous V4L card. I reran the setup but this time I selected the correct Hauppauge Win-TV PVR x50 setting, since I have a PVR 150 and that worked instantly much better.

Now getting the TV output working was a bit harder. For starters, I had the SVideo cable connected on the PVR 150 (which is an input!) instead of the GeForce 6200. Double doh :-) After using the right output, I was able to see the TV in text mode but not when running X11.

There's an nvidia-settings application that was installed yet I couldn't find anything related to TV out in there. There's also a binary called nvtv which would persit in giving me an error: # nvtv Fatal: No supported video card found. I read a lot of stuff online about using the proprietary nVidia driver and configuring different screens/monitors in /etc/X11/xorg.com but none of that stuff worked.

Eventually I downloaded the latest proprietary nVidia Linux driver but then I had another issue: first it would refuse to do anything when X11 was running and second even when I managed to kill X11 it complained about a missing 'precompiled kernel interface" for my kernel.

OK failing to be able to stop X11 sounds really lame. How hard can it be to kill the damn process once root? Well hard when it auto-respawns like crazy :-) I couldn't find anything to stop in /etc/init.d/, for example no gdm and although there's an xsession in there it changed nothing.

After discussing with MM, I found out that the trick is that KnoppMyth does it in /etc/inittab. They have this line at the very end: c7:2345:respawn:/usr/bin/openvt -fwc 6 -- /bin/su - mythtv -c /usr/bin/startx >& /dev/null

Even going single-user mode with telinit 1 didn't stop X. Pretty peculiar, which sounds like a bug since it's not targetted to run level 1.

Anyhow the simple solution, if not brutal, is to comment out the line and restart. Voila, no X11 auto-starting when you don't want to.

Now the trick to get the nVidia driver to install is actually finely described in the KnoppMythWiki on the nVidiaSetup page. Heck I wasted many hours on that one when the solution was written right there. I'll summarise it here for me, I recommend you go read the wiki and get all the glory details: mkdir /t ; cd /t wget ftp://knoppmyth.net/R5/linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13_2.6.18-chw-13-10.00.Custom_all.deb dpkg -i linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13_2.6.18-chw-13-10.00.Custom_all.deb cd /usr/src tar xjvf linux-source<tab> cd /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-chw-13 cp -r . ../linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13 cd /usr/src rm linux ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13 linux cd /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.18-chw-13 make # <--- Ctrl-C it after a few seconds cd /t sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9746-pkg1.run --expert --kernel-source-path=/usr/src/linux

So the summary is that you need the kernel source, which this ISO of KnoppMyth doesn't provide by default. The kernel is a 2.6.18-chw-13 and the corresponding source is not in APT (it's only up to chw-11 at the time I write this.) However ftp://knoppmyth.net/R5 has the correct linux-source DEB and it just needs to be installed. Once that is done you need to "patch" it to match the existing linux-headers that are in /usr/src (thus the recursive copy.) Then you want to start a make of the kernel source just so that it creates some local config files, so let it run for a few second and abort it. The only difference with the wiki page is that I like to recreate a /usr/src/linux link onto the source tree. Finally I like to run the nVidia script in --expert mode so I can see all what it is doing.

OK not exactly obvious but it only takes a few minutes to do.

Finally I just started X using su - mythtv -c /usr/bin/startx and found out that the nvidia-settings application in the X menu had been updated. Now it had all the options for my card, including full configuration of the TV out feature and voila :-)

So to recap I now have a good MythTV install. LiveTV works, recording and watching recordings works, the remote works I have about 120 hours worth of HD space at good quality. The music collection works and watching divx also works (or more exactly ms-mpeg4-v2 AVIs of the Teletubbies in French that I have encoded for the babies from French TV, yeah no kidding.)

Now I only have a few minor things to sort out namely configuring the WEP for my Linksys WMP11 and explore using ACPI to suspend/resume the PC automatically.