Music Center Project

This has been kicking around in my head since i found three discarded Profusion/X music center devices. They ran a customized version of Red Hat and connected to a licensed music server to stream audio to stores in a mall. Gave one away but kept two to play with.



Obviously, the license had expired but the audio form factor of the case intrigued me and upon opening it up i found a Via mini-ITX board with a C3 533mhz processor, 128 mb of DDR ram and a 40 mb hard drive. May not seem promising but that board packs a lot of tech into a small space, there are 2 DDR ram slots, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 ethernet, onboard vga video, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse and 3 pci slots plus a front panel DVD drive. Not too shabby.



After rummaging around in the parts cabinet i came up with two 512mb DDR 400 sticks, a 200 gig IDE hard drive, a pci angle bracket and a ATI rage pro pci video card and a Packard Bell Fast Media remote plus the Cambridge Audio 2.1 speaker set. Unfortunately the pci angle card was not quite the right form factor but i was able to find one on eBay for $5. So for now we upgraded the ram and the hard drive and replaced the stock optical with a combo drive. Not that we will be burning cd's on this unit but it helps to be flexible. When the angle card arrives we can upgrade from the onboard video.

The system booted fine and we went to the BIOS to change the settings. First we assign 64mb to the onboard video, optimize the BIOS and do an 8X overclock of the C3 cpu resulting in a whopping 1Ghz of speed (while you can go above 8x the board locked up at boot). The board's BIOS is a wonder of flexibility with lots of settings. So now we have a 1gig pc with P3 performance - what to install?

We used to run XBMC on a revo so it was a first choice. Unfortunately the live CD does not run on such old hardware, in fact all the media distros we tried failed to initialize the x-windows GUI or failed to boot. Many are optimized for i686 and won't run on an i386 clone cpu. So we tried Microsoft Windows XP pro which did install but failed to install drivers for the network (which is realtek chip), the audio etc. It ran but slowly and hunting down XP drivers on the internet is always a frustrating experience. What about an older version of Ubuntu? So we haul out the 9.04 desktop 32 bit cd and it boots and installs perfectly. Video is not bad, internet works and so does the audio and USB. We remove some of the uneeded services and apps and get a reasonable performance, hey to even runs the GIMP and OO at 2002 speed. You could even use this as a desktop in a pinch, except no flash in the web browser.

The only problem here is that just about any media software won't run on the C3 cpu. The included movie player and the included rhythmbox audio player works but xbmc and vlc won't install. However, we set rhythmbox to run automatically at boot and have in inhale 3 gig of FLAC audio files from the network.

Next we attach the speakers and put it in shuffle mode. How does it sound? - Excellent as a near-field sound system in a small room. Quite pleasurable while working. It's like listening to 70's FM radio. In fact I am using this with singles from 70's/80's and who knew Alice Cooper, ELO, Deep Purple, et al could sound good? I should hook up the Roland monitors to test and then the Spherex 5.1 system to compare.

The suprising thing about audio is that you never know what might sound good for certain applications. I recently hooked up a pair on 1969 Dynaco A-25 speakers to a 20 watt amplifier and fed it from a original Sony walkman cassette. This is certainly not an 'audiophile grade' system but it sounded quite good. In fact i ended up listening to it all week, trying out different kinds of music and inputs. The conclusion was this system sounded best when fed early 80's and 90's funk from analog sources (not CD's!). Gap Band, Dee-Lite, Morris Day, etc all sounded very good in a small room at middle field distance.

Time for some lunch...

Upgrades:

• better video using a fast pci video card
• customize LIRC to use the packard bell remote
  
• replace default unbuntu window manager with a lighter one
  
• wireless
• replace current board with a modern mini-ITX or mini-ATX board?

The Koha Laptop Project

The idea is to build a portable 'server' that i can take to class to demo stuff and to bring to small labs so students can use it like a server. How well the second idea works out remains to be seen. The first step was to find a laptop that works with Linux and is cheap but powerful enough.

First attempt involved an HP dv6000 but i could never get the wireless to work. So that went to the flea market. I was tempted to use the dell D400 in the kitchen but it is underpowered for a server, fine as a firefox platform. I checked dell's canadian site but couldn't find any with Ubuntu anymore so i looked at the list of dell machines known to run linux.

The flea market yielded a very cheap Dell Inspiron 6400. Cheap because there is no battery, the Vista OS wouldn't boot, and it was missing an ALT key but those are not needed.

The machine is decently powered with 2 gig ram, 120 gig hard drive and a P4 duo core cpu. The seller told me it had intel pro wireless so it seemed a good choice.

I installed 9 but the wireless (the dreaded broadcomm 43xx - the seller was wrong) did not work so i upgraded to version 10 and it was able to see my WAP's.

Next - setup Koha

Koha on the HP 6000

This morning i decided as an experiment to change the old windows xp laptop, an hp 6000 into a dual-boot machine with one half being linux running the koha library system. The laptop sits in the corner unused 90% of the time anyway. I no longer have any interest in windows, xp is useful occasionally for legacy applications but using vista or vista 2, er windows 7 would be huge steps backward in functionality and usability from my macpro labtop or the ubunutu laptop.

The first step was to divide the hard drive into a windows NTFS partition and an Linux ext3 partition. There are commercial programs to do this, i used Partition Magic for years and found it a good, reliable application but it's not installed and the version i own is old. So we download a bootable Gparted cd image and boot it from the optical drive.

The Gparted live CD contains a ultra minimal Linux environment, complete with a sparse GUI. The gparted tool runs and shows you the existing hard drive(s) and their partitions. The first step is to shrink the existing NTFS partition to 60 gig. Plenty of space for XP as I'm not likely to add any new windows apps. Are there new windows apps? Name a 'killer' application that you would purchase windows for. No one buys a OS to run an OS, it's a platform to run applications that you use to do things. The OS is an enabler that should just work. I can't think of anything i want to run on windows besides the occasional use of Microsoft office for work.

Anything i used to do on windows i now do in Linux, at a lot less cost. I bought DOS 2.2, 3.0, 4, 5, 6.22 etc and Windows 2.11, 3.0, 3.11, 95,98,2000, xp, vista and many, many applications over the years. The only software purchases i've done lately are OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 that came with various macs, and iLife/iWork that did not (and some small online purchases from app store, and web sites like Tversity).

So now about 90% of the things i do are done in open source applications or on a mac. The last reason for using windows is that workplaces are still windows-centric. One would think Microsoft would concentrate on making those things work better (think Sharepoint) instead of trying to dominate the 'youth market' with zune, xin?, xbox etc. It's like your dad trying to be cool by growing a ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt...let's face it, Windows is your Dad's operating system and Microsoft is the Dad 'n Lad brand of OS, and no stupid marketing campaign can change that fact so Microsoft - stop trying to be cool and accept you are a middle aged geezer in a white shirt and tie who works in big government and industry.

Anyway, now that i think about it why do i need a windows laptop anyway? The machine is too slow to run Vista (1.8 ghz dual core, 2 gig of ram) acceptably and there is no windows programs i really need on a laptop. So we decide to go the whole hog and boot up with the Koha Live CD and install, using the entire 120gig hd and wiping out Windows. Bye bye. We are now down to one lonely windows desktop which will probably go this year.

The install goes fine, and it picks up the wired connection and offers to install the proprietary drivers for the broadcom wireless and nvidia graphics. Next we want to upgrade from 9 to 10.4 but that does a fair bit of downloading so to save the internet bills we might hump the machine to school tomorrow. This would give us a fairly decent linux box with a fully functioning version of Koha. Sweet. There are a ton of apps on the dual xeon box so we want those too! But for now we grab the ubuntu-resticted-extras from the synaptic package manager. At a download rate of 1003kb/sec this does not take long.

Media Center Project II

The Acer Revo arrived and it is cute. It sits on a little stand and is less than 2" thick but packed with ports. We fired it up and the installed OS is freeDOS!  That's ok, it was supposed to ship with Windows which we were going to wipe anyway. I was just thinking that i've purchased 5 windows licenses in the last year when i bought computers and i use none of them. Sales figures are not the same as 'in use' figures.


As a bonus it shipped with the wireless keyboard and mouse, i'll take that anyday over a version of windows. The included hard disk is SATA but small - 160gig and there is only 1 gig of ram and the usual Atom cpu. I have read that microsoft forces manufactures to adhere to those low end specs if they want to sell windows. Not a problem for this application, as a media center client it only needs an OS and the client software, in fact i could take out the hd and run it from a usb stick. All the audio/video/picture files are stored on the media server (\\megatron). The revo has a wired ethernet port which is ok because we want high speed to the living room. Other media clients can use wireless - we should install the xbmc client on the laptops and liam's iMac. That means all the computers can access the content files which are stored centrally.

We popped open the machine by removing 1 screw and squeezing the side panel. The inside is neat. Added a second 1gig sodimm to bring it up to 2 gig. This is necessary as the video uses the ram, like a cheap laptop it has no dedicated video ram. A setting in the BIOS controls the amount of ram allocated to the nvidia ion chip - we set it to 512mb as we want to output high def video (and sound) via HDMI.

Anyway, we hooked up a usb optical drive, went into the BIOS and changed the 1st boot device to USB and rebooted into an XBMC liveCD. We wiped the hard disk clean and installed - it puts a stripped down version of ubuntu 9.10 with the nvidia ion drivers and the xbmc client on the disk. The internal HD is easy to remove if you want a larger drive, but for heat reasons i would use the eSata connector.

The install and configuration of XBMC was a breeze, the network and all devices were picked up. I plugged in the little dongle for the wireless and the keyboard/mouse were recognized. The network speed was fine, i could browse windows shares (uck) and it picked up the UpnP media server no problem. The skin is incredible, very nice look. Then i plugged in the Vista media center remote and rebooted, it picked it up and worked like a charm. Able to perform all functions, including turning off the unit from the remote. Set up the audio/video settings to 1080i with hdmi sound out and shut down the machine. For setup and testing it was hooked to a 24" LCD via a vga cable.

Then we moved the unit upstairs and plugged it into the Onkyo Integta 9.8 pre-amp. This should route the video and audio to the pre-amp so that any desired video or audio processing takes place in the digital domain and direct the video out via hdmi to the 54" Panasonic and the audio via XLR cables to the power amps and then to the speakers.

This is where we hit the first problem occurred. At boot time the text was shown but with red streaking dashed lines all over the screen and after the XBMC logo appeared the screen went blank and the pre-amp displayed 'no video signal'. So i tried hooking it directly to the Panasonic and no signal at all. It was if the two devices were not syncing the video signal. I hauled up a vga monitor and changed the resolutions - cycling though 480i,480p,720p etc without joy. So off to searching the internet for answers. It seems there are a number of issues with using the liveCD and with HDMI audio/video under Ubunutu/XBMC. Some people appeared to have them solved but there are different approaches and no clear cut answer. This means some trial and error - which will take time. The unit will have to be returned to the basement for more tests.

The other issue is around the updating of the liveCD - once installed, updating is not clear to me. It can be done but again would require research and trial and error. I am thinking a better option would be to just go ahead and install 9.10 on the box along with the XBMC client repositories. This way i get the updates automatically. Plus, i can set it to auto boot the xbmc client anyway. Looks like i need some time...

Finally, i went with xbmc instead of mythTV because i don't have cable or satellite. However, i did install a small, cheap HDTV antenna in the attic and ran coax cable down to the Panasonic which has an HD tuner. I get one channel (SUN TV) over the air. The quality is fantastic. This makes me think that next year when analog over the air TV is finally gone that their would be more OTA high def signals. At that point it would make sense to purchase a tv-tuner card for the media server. The card would have to be supported by linux but once that is installed and setup then any of the clients could get TV as well as being able to record shows (as if there was anything on....)

Koha LiveCD

Writing this from Ubuntu running on a USB stick in the lab. Even better, it is running the Koha ILS (and Dspace, and OAI harvester and dbWiz - things i have wanted to use in class but could not because of the IT limitations).

Thanks to the great work of Dr. ARD Prasad (ard@drtc.isibang.ac.in) there is now a LiveCD of Koha 3.0 available. Goto http://sf.net/projects/liblivecd and download the .iso and burn the image to a CD.

You can run it from the CD and login to the Admin module or just use the OPAC (of course, until you set it up it has nothing...)

OPAC is http://localhost/opac
Admin is http://localhost/kohaadmin

the admin username is kohaadmin and the password is library. I was able to set up Koha in a few minutes and then use the built-in client to make a Z39.50 connection to the Library of Congress server and do some copy cataloging. With some books in the OPAC i was able to do some searching.

Since the OS is Ubuntu 9.10 i decided to make a bootable USB version, the idea being i could then save settings, tweak the install and add some more programs.

In Ubuntu select System, Admin, USB Startup and select your stick. I first tried a USB stick formatted with ext2 filesystem but it did not mount, so i had to reformat the stick as FAT32 so that it was detected. The Install to USB function asks how much space to reserve on the USB stick for persistent data, i select 512mb on a 2 gig stick. The Ubuntu image is about 670mb so i figured this would leave enough room.

The entire process takes about 4 minutes and when you restart the USB boots into Ubuntu from where you can setup and run Koha. Just launch Firefox all the information you need is displayed. Sweet! Many thanks to Mr. Prasad for this. I have some screenshots of the Koha setup but i need to work though it a couple of times to understand all the options and then write it up for the class lab.

There is another Koha Live CD done in Aug 2009 available from Mizstik projects at http://mizstik.com/projects/koha-livecd/ but i have not tried it. Maybe a comparison should be done. I notice the same site has a mod for Openbiblio called the Home Edition. Will have to take a look, wish someone would take over that project and get it going again...