Koolu as MythTV frontend suggestions

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Tue Jan 29 20:50:50 EST 2008


Got my Koolu (http://www.koolu.com) yesterday and found an hour or two 
to play with it last night, inspired by Bruce Dawson's low-power Linux 
presentation earlier this month 
(http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/12717).
Out-of-Box-Experience was delightful: unpack, plug it in, it works.
Running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, it connected to the network, did the
updates, runs silently and draws 7 or 8 watts. Very nice.

I followed the postings at http://forum.koolu.org to install the AMD
SVGA drivers and the MythTV front end. Other than a few fumbles on the
operator side, everything went fine, and I was watching video from the
MythTV backend. However, there was the occasional hesitation or
artifact; it's apparent the machine was working hard. Has anyone got any
suggestions on what to tweak and how?

1. I was thinking I'd start with 'top' and determine if the CPU's
overloaded: I suspect GNOME is overkill for an X session where I really
just want to host the Qt-driven MythTV front end, and was thinking that
Xfce right out of the repositories might be easy to set up and test this.

2. I'm also planning on reviewing the xorg.conf and see if there are
things there worth tweaking. I pretty much just lifted the [Device]
stanzas from the sample at http://www.koolu.org/xorg.conf and a little
more research on what's actually needed might speed throughput. Last
night the goal was "Watson, come here!" proof-of-concept. Today is
cleanup and fine tuning.

3. Finally and reluctantly, I'll do some overdue housekeeping on the
network. I suspect somewhere in my 3-floor, 5 switch configuration, I've
got some sub-par connections, bad cables and maybe a marginal NIC, as
throughput is not what I'd expect. I'm guessing this can be worked out
with a series of trial-and-error, copy-a-big-file from A-to-B tests to
pinpoint the problem.

So, anyone else using a Koolu? As a Myth Front-End? As something else
kool? What works and what doesn't? Pointers or resources? Any
suggestions welcomed. Google is rather sparse and the "forum" is
read-only HOWTOs, due to spammers.



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list