Possession is ten tenths of the law
January 14th, 2007(Thank Sarah for the title, apparently Linguists are allowed to remake well known phrases)
Yesterday I started assembling my mythical MythTV box.
MythTV? That’s a cool bit of software which takes a Linux install and does the job of a Tivo/Sky+ but better. It can do all the usual stuff like timer recording programmes (or whole series) to hard disk, playing DVDs and other nice things, like running the MAME emulator to play old console games.
Mythical? Because I’ve been talking about building it for about three years and haven’t got around to it. Yesterday I thought “screw it, just put bits together” (or words to that effect). So I now have a motherboard with processor and RAM which locks solid about a minute after booting. I’m working on the theory that I need more thermal compound under the heatsink.
But at least it’s a start. And the remaining bits that I need (tuner card, graphics card with a TV-out, wifi card) have been bought from eBay so hopefully I’ll have all the hardware together soon.
I like that it’s getting easier to choose hardware for Linux now, but it’s still not easy. I’ve bought cheap stuff because I’m not sure if it’ll all work or if I’ll have some doorstops. It’s really nice to Google a chipset and find “this has been supported since kernel 2.6.8″ but there’s also a lot of vagueness. It’s this very vagueness that’s been putting me off completing the set and buying the things I need to make this work. Trying to figure out if a DVB tuner card will work is tricky to say the least. I’m resolving to blog the stuff I have and the process I go through so maybe it’ll help someone else. If it all works…
At this point I’d like to thank the kind donor of a temporary case to build this in. I say donor, I mean Greek person who left it by the bins on West Newington Place. I say Greek because there was also a keyboard which seems to be in Greek. Anyway, thanks!
I’ll let you know how it goes. In other news, I still don’t like Higher Maths. Compound Angle Formulae?? You’re kidding, right?
