Introduction Environment Hardware - Selection - Installation Software - OS Installation - Networking - X-Windows - Audio - MythTV Frontend Links

Hardware Selection I spent quite a lot of time researching what hardware to buy to build the Pundit system. I'll try and explain in as much detail as possible here the bits of hardware that I've bought and the reasons behind why I picked those specific items. Case & Motherboard Manufacturer: ASUS Model: Pundit AB-P2600 Supplier: Scan Computers Intl Cost: £148.05 The ASUS Pundit is the 'barebones' system that made me want to put this project together in the first place. The Pundit includes both the case with a fully featured motherboard (ASUS P4S8L) already fitted and has many features which make it suited to this type of project: Small Form Factor Good Looking Quiet Operation On-Board Graphics Including TV-Out On-Board Sound and LAN There are only a couple minor niggles with this machine from what I can see: Lack Of Remote Control Digital Audio Out Should Be At Rear But neither of those are serious for this project. I will add a remote control solution and I only need stereo out to the TV so I don't really care about digital sound out. I think the Pundit should make a really nice system for this project. As you can see in the above picture, the Pundit comes complete with manual, IDE cable, CD/DVD audio cable, power cable and driver CD. A packet of 4 fixing screws for a hard disk or DVD drive was also included. The driver CD even includes Linux drivers for some of the motherboard features such as the LAN port. CPU Manufacturer: Intel Model: Celeron 2.0 GHz Supplier: Scan Computers Intl Cost: £57.81 I chose a fairly low powered CPU, a Celeron 2.0 GHz. I'm only going to be using this machine as a front end machine and so it doesn't need heaps of power that you would require if it was doing encoding for example. From what I've heard from other people I could even have gone for the lower powered, and slightly cheaper, Celeron 1.7 GHz and that would have been fine either. The CPU I bought din't come with a heat-sink and fan, which is fine as the Pundit comes with its own which are specially shaped to move air out of the case via a special vent on the side. The fan that comes with the Pundit is also speed controlled based on temperature to keep it as quiet as possible. So, if you can buy a processor like this one without a heat-sink-fan unit then you might be able to save a few pounds. I had wondered about whether the processor type could affect how loud the machine gets... the fans in the Pundit only come on when certain temperature thresholds are met and I was wondering which would be cooler: A low powered CPU running at high utilization OR A high powered CPU running at low utilization After asking this question on the MythTV mailing list though I got several replies that I could just go for a cheap low power chip and the fans shouldn't really spin up at all. At least going for the 2.0 GHz Celeron instead of the 1.7 GHz model means that the dia size of the chip is smaller which should make it slightly cooler. Memory Manufacturer: Unknown Model: 512MB DDR 333 Supplier: Scan Computers Intl Cost: £43.77 Nothing special about the memory choice, it's 512MB of DDR 333 memory. I bought this as one module so that I can always add another 512MB later if needed, but I think that 512MB should be more than enough. Note that the memory is acutally shared between the main memory and the graphics card memory so allow for that when deciding how much memory to buy. Other people have suggested that 64MB should be allocated to the graphics card (which is the max that can be allocated to it AFAIK). Some people have started with 256MB of memory but often they've needed to add another 128MB to that some time later hence why I've gone with 512MB straight off. Hard Disk Manufacturer: Maxtor Model: 30GB DiamondMax Plus 8 Spec: 30GB, 7200RPM, ATA 133 Supplier Maplin Electronics Cost £49.99 I don't need a large disk for this project given that this is going to be a frontend only machine. It seems that you can't buy a disk less than about 20-30 GB these days which is way more than I'll need really. I decided to go for a Maxtor drive for one particular reason... I've heard that there are some tools available from Maxtor to make these drives operate quieter (at the cost of performance of course) which seems like a good idea for this project given that I would like to make the machine as quiet as possible. I bought the drive 'bare' so nothing came with it apart from the drive itself (not even any fixing screws - but I have plenty of those around and the Pundit came with four too). I was surprised how slim this drive is, certainly slimmer than the drives I've bought in the past. This may well be advantageous given the small space in the Pundit... it will hopefully allow a little more airflow around the drive and keep it a bit cooler. DVD-ROM Drive Manufacturer: Sony Model: DDU 1612 Spec: 16x DVD, 40x CD Supplier: Scan Computers Intl Cost: £25.26 I wasn't too bothered about which DVD drive I got. At first, I'd been thinking that a normal 'white' drive might not look too good and that I should try and find one which is gray or silver, but a colleague at work recently bought a Pundit and put a white drive in there which looked fine to me so I stopped worrying about that. There are a few considerations to bear in mind when selecting a DVD drive though: Loading Mechanism The front of the Pundit has a sprung-loaded door covering up the DVD drive bay. This door will be automatically pushed open by a tray from the DVD drive and will close again as the tray retracts. This makes getting a tray loading drive much more sensible. You can open the door by hand if you wish, so having a slot loader wouldn't be the end of the world from what I can see. Eject Button Location/Form The pundit has a button on the front of the case to eject the CD/DVD. This mechanism works by basically just pushing through to push the eject button on the drive itself. The push through button is quite long so should work on the majority of drives without any problem. I had previously been thinking of getting a Samsung grey coloured drive and I've since noticed that its eject button is sunken and so probably wouldn't work with this mechanism so that's something to watch out for. Vertical Usage I have heard reports that some drives don't work very well when they are mounted vertically. Given that most people will use the Pundit in a vertical position this is something that might be a concern. I don't have any information as to drives which are known to work or not work well vertically though so this is a bit of pot-luck at the moment. Noise DVD drives tend to be fairly noisy, especially when running at high speed, so if you are trying to make a system which is as silent as possible then this would be a consideration. I don't have any information about drives which are good or bad though so this has been pot-luck for me again. I did think that one other consideration was to consider whether the drive would require firmware updates to make it region free and whether those were available. When I got the drive however I tried it out in my PC first and I found that it would play any region DVDs just fine. I'm not sure if that's because of the software on Linux or the hardware though? The drive I chose was a Sony ... There is nothing particularly special about it, the cheap price was about the largest consideration - I just went for the cheapest drive which fitted most of the above criteria. Because this was a cheap drive, it came with nothing but the drive itself - no fixing screws, cables or even manual. This was fine though for me as the screws and cables that came with the Pundit were perfectly adequate. Remote Control Manufacturer: Sapphire (Powered By ATI) Model: Remote Wonder Supplier: Komplett Cost: £22.67 The one thing that the Pundit is really missing out of the box is a way of remote control for it. The remote control that I've selected is the ATI Remote Wonder. This is a USB device which communicates with RF instead of IR There are several things that I like about this remote control: RF Instead Of IR Because this remote doesn't use infra-red it means that I don't have to have an ugly looking infra-red receiver sitting on the desk next to the machine. Instead, the RF receiver dongle can be hidden away out of view. Linux Support A Linux kernel module is available to receive events from this device and translate them into key events that X applications can understand. This should make the configuration of this remote fairly easy. Reasonably Cheap There are however some downsides to the remote: Can't Control My TV Because this remote is not IR based, I wont be able to program my TV, I'll have to have a seperate remote for that. Can't Power ON Machine It's a pity that although I will be able to shutdown the machine via the remote, it's likely that I wont be able to turn on the machine from it. That's going to be a manual process unfortunately. Rather Large A smaller, sexier remote would have been nicer, although I've seen a lot worse! Not All Buttons Make Sense Because this remote is being used for something it wasn't designed specifically for, there will have to be some 'creative' usage of some of the buttons. Other Hardware I'll be using a keyboard and mouse during installation but I wont be keeping them connected once the machine is finished so I'll just use ones I have lying around for now. I do intend to add a wireless network card at some point in the hopefully not too distant future. I'd like to put an 802.11g card into one of the PCI slots, but none of these are supported under Linux yet so I'll have to wait for a while. Until then I'll just use the built in LAN adapter on the motherboard.