|
Introduction Determining your needs Basic Hardware Audio Video Video Card Configuration LIRC Input Devices TV/HDTV Tuner Cards Installing Linux HTPC Software HTPC Tips and Tricks Conclusion |
Linux HTPC How-toTips and tricks for your HTPCDoing your own research on a HTPCGoogle is a powerful tool. Most of my research came from using Google. Type in a keyword, an error message, or anything you have a question on and hunt for answers. If you do need to do research and think I should have covered it, read the conclusion page and e-mail me with what you had to find.Getting a good price on hardwareI always start off with Pricewatch.com. It's an automated web site that allows companies to compete for the best prices on hardware. Once you know what hardware you want, go there and see what the cheapest prices are. If you can find something at a local store within 10% then you're doing well. Using Pricewatch also helps you from being ripped off because you know how much it can cost. Froogle (A Google beta site) is also a good place for locating low prices on hardware. I found my rare sound card this way. Newegg is also another place to get low prices. They have a decent warranty plus they have good technical detail and specs on the hardware.Auto login and startupMy favorite is the ability to have Linux automatically login as a user on boot and start MythTV. Depending on which graphical login manager you use, it's possible to have it login as a system user without prompting for a password or user name. To do this you need to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf or /etc/kdm/kdm.conf or /etc/xdm/xdm.conf. In the gdm configurations files there is a line labeled like, "AutomaticLoginEnable=false". Change the false value to true. Later in the file there will be a line labeled like, "LocalNoPasswordUsers=". Put the user name you wish to have login automatically. Such as "LocalNoPasswordUsers=mythtv". Next time you boot your computer it will login as this user. If you are using kdm or xdm instead of gdm, the lines that need to be changed will not be labeled the same. If you read through the kdm or xdm configuration file you should see lines that mean the same thing.Partioning for the mediaMy root partition is 3GB that holds the Linux installation. It is on a 30GB drive. The other 27GB on the drive holds a partition with my music collection (all encoded myself from my CD's, and it's only 5GB anyway) I have all HDTV stored on a 180GB hard drive by itself. By doing this I won't run out of space on my root file system from HDTV recording (which could cause bad things to happen). If I need to switch hard drives, or add another, by having all my media on it's own partition (or in this case a drive for HDTV), it saves me from loosing that data if I have to reinstall the OS or if I want to add another drive and do software raid. It also helps in that I can get full throughput on that drive when recording HDTV. Without it recording HDTV to it's own disk, I had rare stuttering of music at times when I was recording 4 HDTV streams at once. One drive was able to write 4 streams, but it could not read at the same time. This would not have happened if I was using a second large drive and software raid.Turning on powersave for Athlon CPU'scip.uni-trier.de/nofftz/linux/Athlon-Powersaving-HOWTO.html has a how-to on using command line setpci commands or an athcool application to set an AMD Athlon CPU into a powersaving state. There are some known bugs in that it can cause jumpy music and video playback as well as slow down ultra-dma but this depends on the motherboard so be aware of that.Hotkey supporthotkeys on sourceforge.lineak version. Other HTPC sitesHTPC News |