Mythical fun (4)
One takes an old Dell desktop machine, with a Celeron 700 MHz or so. Then:
- Put in a cheapo video card with TV-out (a Jaton Video-198PCI, which features NVidia chipsets ).
- Rummage through a drawer to find a PCI sound-card.
- Rummage through a different drawer to find a working network card.
- Hook up a previously retired 10Mb/s hub to multiply the incoming Cat5 that the MythTV front-end uses in the bedroom.
- Install a minimal Debian/sarge, add basic things like rsync, less.
- Make sure to also install the nvidia kernel modules, and then of course the basics for X11 and finally a MythTV front-end.
Actual money invested so far for parts I didn’t already have: $30-40 for the video card.
End-result: A second front-end for the livingroom, so that the kids can watch some recorded daytime TV when it suits us/them, instead of watching the same Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVD over and over and over and… Ugh!
Still to do: Set up DHCP to hand out a fixed IP number for this machine and give it appropriate DNS so I can more easily ssh in for maintenance and such, later.
I also still need to figure out what needs to be done exactly (preferably repeatably) to get the StreamZap remote to work, but in the meantime I can probably move the Pinnacle remote to the livingroom and make do with a cordless keyboard.
The first test has already been passed successfully, in the sense that both front-ends were in use at the same time last night and the network held up beautifully and the front-ends worked without a glitch. The MRTG output shows a nearly 600 kB/s throughput, which I guess means the theoretical 10Mb/s was only 50% used. 