COSMIC

The Comprehensive Open Source Multimedia Integrated Computer

The name could probably be better but this was the best I could come up with for a working title. It is a work in progress. My goal is to build a computer that will record and play television; play DVDs and MP3s; and burn DVDs, CDs VCDs etc.

• Hardware
• Software
• Configuration
• Other

Hardware

	Shuttle SK41G barebones system Provides 1 AGP and 1 PCI slot. 200/266 MHz FSB. Integrated Realtek Ethernet, Sound, Graphics, USB 2.0, IEEE1394. Takes AMD Athlon/Duron processors. Uses a heat pipe cooling system.
	AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8 GHz Socket A Thoroughbred processor
	Corsair DDR SDRAM 2 X 512 MB PC2100 CAS 2.5 Model #CM64SD512-2100
	ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV TV Tuner/64M 3D/2D Graphics
	Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
	Pioneer DVR-A05 DVD-RW Drive ATAPI 4x DVD-R, 2x DVD-RW 16x CD-R 8x CD-RW
	Seagate Barracuda 80 Gig ATA IV Hard Drive 7200 RPM, ATA 100 I chose this because in my experience, these are the quietest 7200 RPM drives.

Software

• Red Hat 9. After many attempts with other distros, I finally tried Red Hat 9. It seems to be working so I'm going to try sticking with it.
• ATI Unified Linux Drivers. I have not decided whether or not to use these. I'm trying to avoid it since they are not open source. That's not a political decision, more of an aesthetic one.
• GATOS software. The GATOS Project has tools for viewing and recording television, ATI video drivers, a driver for the remote control and capture software.
• Xine
• More to come ....

Configuration

     Dates in red are where I made positive progress.

Jan 11, 2003: Configuration info coming soon.

Jan 13, 2003: Installed Red Hat 8.0. I was pleased to see that the system booted right up. By the time I got the OS installed it was late. I haven't gotten X-Windows working yet. I don't know if this is a driver issue or an issue of finding the right modes for my crappy monitor.
     I ended up choosing the ext3 file system. I wanted to use ReiserFS but I couldn't figure out the trick to make Red Hat give me that as a choice. For software, I installed almost all of Gnome and KDE plus nearly all development libraries. I probably won't need all that since I only plan to use this box for multimedia. Since I may need to compile something, however, I decided I could install a lot of stuff. Besides, I do have an 80 gig drive. :)
     One cool thing I found was the TV output just worked. I hooked up the video to the TV right away. While I was waiting for Red Hat for format my hard drive I turned on the TV and saw the computer output. Okay, to be honest, I was watching Stargate SG-1 reruns and flipped over to video during a commercial. But it works!

Jan 17, 2003: Tried to get X working. Was unsuccessful. The xconfiguration process didn't produce any mode lines for my monitor.

Jan 19, 2003: Copied mode lines from another X server. It still doesn't work. Now I'm starting to think the problem is the video card and not the crappy monitor (an old Gateway 500EV).

Jan 23, 2003: Read further into Gatos. They suggested that using RPM and DEB based distros complicates matters because they often get creative about where they put X11 files.
     Decided to use Gentoo. First attempt with Gentoo 1.2 did not work. I tried stage 1 and stage 2. In both cases emerge was broken. I'll try Gentoo 1.4_rc2 next.

Mar 21, 2003: I got no joy from Gentoo 1.4_rc2. The default kernel didn't support my USB keyboard and mouse so I couldn't use them to install the system. I could have used the PS/2 adapters and changed back after the install but it's the principle of the thing.
     Tried Mandrake. I can't recall the version, it was their latest release (9.0). The OS installed fine but I can't seem to compile Imake in the XFree86 4.2 sources.

Apr 5, 2003: Woo-Hoo! Red Hat 9 got X and my sound card working out of the box. Once I get the patches applied I'm going to start messing around with multimedia. Red Hat 9 comes with XFree86 4.3.0 and DRI drivers for Radeon. The default sound setup uses ALSA.
     Got Xine working. Needed to specify correct DVD device. Red Hat put them under /dev/video. (I'm tempted to say Woo-Hoo again. This is the first time I've seen a DVD under Linux.)
     I also started working on GATOS. I had to compile and install Tcl/Tk 8.4 for AVview. Also fetched Rawhide RPMs for automake, lame, libzvbi, and ALSA. Some came from RawHide, some from FreshRPMs, and some from Mandrake Cooker.

Apr 6, 2003:Got km compiled from CVS. There was a problem with a call to remap_page_range in km_api_data.c. Here is a diff -u of the one line I changed:

--- km_api_data.old 2003-04-06 13:00:54.000000000 -0500
+++ km_api_data.c 2003-04-06 13:03:54.000000000 -0500
@@ -261,7 +261,7 @@
if(chunk_size*i+PAGE_SIZE*j>offset+size)return 0;
page=kvirt_to_pa(dvb->ptr[i]+j*PAGE_SIZE);
start=vma->vm_start+chunk_size*i+PAGE_SIZE*j-offset;
- if(remap_page_range(start, page, PAGE_SIZE, PAGE_SHARED))
+ if(remap_page_range(vma, start, page, PAGE_SIZE, PAGE_SHARED))
return -EAGAIN;
}
return 0;

I don't know if that's right. I only know it compiles and the module loads without complaint.

     I still haven't managed to get AVview working. I tried a Mandrake cooker RPM, and compiled the tarball from GATOS. I finally tried compiling the CVS version today (after compiling automake 1.7.2). It's choking on ffmpeg which I thought I fixed but I'm still seeing an error. I'll post more info after I figure it out.

Jan 31, 2004: Update, this isn't really much of a project anymore. Red Hat 9 solved most of the problems and FreshRPMs took care of everything else. I now use this machine as my desktop. The fan is just too loud to have it in the living room. Most of its multimedia capabilities are wasted but if I ever need to copy or rip anything, I'm all set.

Other

Computing at jimliedeka.com
You may contact me via jliedeka _at_ tds _dot_ net. Sorry for making you type it but I've seen spammers combing my web server.