The Ultimate Mediacenter – Part II

Meanwhile I gave Fedora a chance to
proof that it’s worth to build a mediacenter in less time than on
gentoo.
After hours of downloading and burning the installation dvd (what
happened to the good old network-install)
I managed to setup a minimal Fedora Core 3 system (minimal means
700MB on Fedora, ughh, Gentoo does the same in 40MB).Due to the high demand of diskspace for a core installation I
needed to assign a unused logical volume of my gentoo
base system and relocate /usr to it. But anyway everything works
out of the box. Well done.

The Via Epia M10000 C3 Ezra mini-itx system needs special packages
for hardware-acceleration (direct rendering, mpeg2-decoding, motion
compensation).
Those are available for FC3 on:
http://washington.kelkoo.net/epia/FC3
Simply installing xorg-x11 will select the epia-specific packages,
as long as the epia repository is set up correctly.

Currently there’s only a binary rpm for via-drm on the C3
nehemia(i686) version of the Epia M10000 board available.
So I had to rebuild a native C3 ezra-t(i586) version of the
package:

rpmbuild –rebuild –target i586
kernel-module-via-drm-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-2.6.7-1.ucr.src.rpm

For the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T card and a few others there,
just right in time, an backpatch-update for the cx88-driver on FC3
became available on
http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable
cx88-kmdl-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-0.0.4_20050708_202133-58.rhfc3.at.i586.rpm

So far done for the base.

I intendently left out more detailed setup of configfiles,
startup-entries and so on, which can be found everywhere on
google.
(xorg.conf for epia, minimal fc3 init.d, modules.conf, rc.local,
.xinitrc)

For a mediabox which should boot really fast, a big window desktop
is just overhead, so I’ll use the minimalistic twm as my
windowmanager, although there’re people who prefer a minimalistic
windowmaker instead. We’ll see later if that’s worth a
change.
After installing TWM, I do “switchdesktop twm”, for activation (twm
should be default anyway).

Now for the mediacenter software…

I decided to use mythtv, as it is best supported and has wide
plugin support for almost every feature someone could want.
Not sure yet if streaming internet tv will be supported through a
playlist-wrapper for mplayer. We’ll see later.

The Mythtv-suite as well as mplayer and friends are all available
here:
http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable

Fedora will not be my favourite system, but at least it’s fast on
Epia and package support is ok for common use. Except for the
compile time gentoo’s package-management is lightyears faster than
on fedora.

Let’s see how this stuff works tomorrow.
Good night.