HTPC

Continuing in the vein of ‘stupid hardware problems’, this week I discovered that the ASUS A7N8x deluxe motherboard I’ve been trying to nurse along as the backbone of my MythTV PVR basically doesn’t play nicely with linux, period. Don’t ask me why I didn’t try searching the web a little harder before, since most of the threads I’ve referenced below are ancient. Basically there is something screwy with its ACPI implementation, SATA controller, and just about everything else. ...

I have a radeon 9200 video card in my HTPC, since when I bought it all the HTPC enthusiasts over at http://www.avsforum.com seemed to think ATI was better for tv output. I also wanted the possibility of using a component adapter cable (which I never bought). For years I’ve been happily using the ATI proprietary FGLRX drivers under linux to drive my Toshiba 27" TV with an svideo cable. Alas, all good things come to an end. Xorg 7.0 came along with my Fedora Core 5 and MythTV 0.20 upgrade, and with it came FGLRX breakage. Or to be precise, along with it came an FGLRX upgrade. ...

My MythTV system has been in place for several years now, and has seen many versions of Fedora. Ensuring the IVTV modules were loaded correctly after a system restart has always been a bit of a black art, however, and with Fedora Core 5 this seems to be no less of an exception. However, I think I have got it partially figured out, so here it is. First things first. Modern 2.6 linux kernels apparently fully support hardware autodetection. I understand that to mean you aren’t support to need to manually (or in a script) modprobe ivtv nor should you have to explicitly put any configuration into modprobe.conf. If your IVTV kernel modules are installed correctly, it’s supposed to be automatically detected, and then udev is supposed to create the relevant devices for you. This is working for me, however changing the permissions on video devices in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules isn’t working. I tried to use this line to do it, but it appears to be ignored in general. ...